Download or read book A Great Plains Reader written by Diane Dufva Quantic and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation.
Download or read book Great Plains written by Ian Frazier and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2001-05-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
Download or read book A Great Plains Reader written by Diane Dufva Quantic and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the Plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. ø The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. R”lvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature?s furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains.
Download or read book Great Plains Literature written by Linda Ray Pratt and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-03 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Plains Literature is an exploration of influential literature of the Plains region in both the United States and Canada. It reflects the destruction of the culture of the first people who lived there, the attempts of settlers to conquer the land, and the tragic losses and successes of settlement that are still shaping our modern world of environmental threat, ethnic and racial hostilities, declining rural communities, and growing urban populations. In addition to featuring writers such as Ole Edvart Rölvaag, Willa Cather, and John Neihardt, who address the epic stories of the past, Great Plains Literature also includes contemporary writers such as Louis Erdrich, Kent Haruf, Ted Kooser, Rilla Askew, N. Scott Momaday, and Margaret Laurence. This literature encompasses a history of courage and violence, aggrandizement and aggression, triumph and terror. It can help readers understand better how today's threats to the environment, clashes with Native people, struggling small towns, and rural migration to the cities reflect the same forces that were important in the past.
Download or read book Prairie Fire written by Julie Courtwright and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prairie fires have always been a spectacular and dangerous part of the Great Plains. Nineteenth-century settlers sometimes lost their lives to uncontrolled blazes, and today ranchers such as those in the Flint Hills of Kansas manage the grasslands through controlled burning. Even small fires, overlooked by history, changed lives-destroyed someone's property, threatened someone's safety, or simply made someone's breath catch because of their astounding beauty. Julie Courtwright, who was born and raised in the tallgrass prairie of Butler County, Kansas, knows prairie fires well. In this first comprehensive environmental history of her subject, Courtwright vividly recounts how fire-setting it, fighting it, watching it, fearing it-has bound Plains people to each other and to the prairies themselves for centuries. She traces the history of both natural and intentional fires from Native American practices to the current use of controlled burns as an effective land management tool, along the way sharing the personal accounts of people whose lives have been touched by fire. The book ranges from Texas to the Dakotas and from the 1500s to modern times. It tells how Native Americans learned how to replicate the effects of natural lightning fires, thus maintaining the prairie ecosystem. Native peoples fired the prairie to aid in the hunt, and also as a weapon in war. White settlers learned from them that burns renewed the grasslands for grazing; but as more towns developed, settlers began to suppress fires-now viewed as a threat to their property and safety. Fire suppression had as dramatic an environmental impact as fire application. Suppression allowed the growth of water-wasting trees and caused a thick growth of old grass to build up over time, creating a dangerous environment for accidental fires. Courtwright calls on a wide range of sources: diary entries and oral histories from survivors, colorful newspaper accounts, military weather records, and artifacts of popular culture from Gene Autry stories to country song lyrics to Little House on the Prairie. Through this multiplicity of voices, she shows us how prairie fires have always been a significant part of the Great Plains experience-and how each fire that burned across the prairies over hundreds of years is part of someone's life story. By unfolding these personal narratives while looking at the bigger environmental picture, Courtwright blends poetic prose with careful scholarship to fashion a thoughtful paean to prairie fire. It will enlighten environmental and Western historians and renew a sense of wonder in the people of the Plains.
Download or read book Great Plains Indians written by David J. Wishart and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David J. Wishart's Great Plains Indians covers thirteen thousand years of fascinating, dynamic, and often tragic history. From a hunting and gathering lifestyle to first contact with Europeans to land dispossession to claims cases, and much more, Wishart takes a wide-angle look at one of the most significant groups of people in the country. Myriad internal and external forces have profoundly shaped Indian lives on the Great Plains. Those forces--the environment, religion, tradition, guns, disease, government policy--have written their way into this history. Wishart spans the vastness of Indian time on the Great Plains, bringing the reader up to date on reservation conditions and rebounding populations in a sea of rural population decline. Great Plains Indians is a compelling introduction to Indian life on the Great Plains from thirteen thousand years ago to the present.
Download or read book Great Plains written by Michael Forsberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Plains were once among the greatest grasslands on the planet. But as the United States and Canada grew westward, the Plains were plowed up, fenced in, overgrazed, and otherwise degraded. Today, this fragmented landscape is the most endangered and least protected ecosystem in North America. But all is not lost on the prairie. Through lyrical photographs, essays, historical images, and maps, this beautifully illustrated book gets beneath the surface of the Plains, revealing the lingering wild that still survives and whose diverse natural communities, native creatures, migratory traditions, and natural systems together create one vast and extraordinary whole. Three broad geographic regions in Great Plains are covered in detail, evoked in the unforgettable and often haunting images taken by Michael Forsberg. Between the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2008, Forsberg traveled roughly 100,000 miles across 12 states and three provinces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to complete the photographic fieldwork for this project, underwritten by The Nature Conservancy. Complementing Forsberg’s images and firsthand accounts are essays by Great Plains scholar David Wishart and acclaimed writer Dan O’Brien. Each section of the book begins with a thorough overview by Wishart, while O’Brien—a wildlife biologist and rancher as well as a writer—uses his powerful literary voice to put the Great Plains into a human context, connecting their natural history with man’s uses and abuses. The Great Plains are a dynamic but often forgotten landscape—overlooked, undervalued, misunderstood, and in desperate need of conservation. This book helps lead the way forward, informing and inspiring readers to recognize the wild spirit and splendor of this irreplaceable part of the planet.
Download or read book To the Last Smoke written by Stephen J. Pyne and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From boreal Alaska to subtropical Florida, from the chaparral of California to the pitch pine of New Jersey, America boasts nearly a billion burnable acres. In nine previous volumes, Stephen J. Pyne has explored the fascinating variety of flame region by region. In To the Last Smoke: An Anthology, he selects a sampling of the best from each. To the Last Smoke offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The anthology functions as a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. The series is Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”
Download or read book Imagining the Plains of Latin America written by Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pampas lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil to the Altiplano plateau that stretches between Chile and Peru, the plains of Latin America have haunted the literature and culture of the continent. Bringing these landscapes into focus as a major subject of Latin American culture, this book outlines innovative new ecocritcial readings of canonical literary texts from the 19th century to the present. Tracing these natural landscapes across national borders the book develops a new transnational understanding of Hispanic culture in South America and expands the scope of the contemporary environmental humanities. Texts covered include works by: Ciro Alegría, Manoel de Barros, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustasio Rivera, João Guimarães Rosa, and Domingo Sarmiento.
Download or read book The Great Plains Trilogy written by Willa Cather and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willa Cather was the 1922 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her breakthrough in literature were the three novels featured here in this edition, the so-called “Great Plains Trilogy”. All three novels stage in Nebraska and the surrounding Great Plains territory and deal with the life there, family challenges and romance. Included are: O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark My Antonia
Download or read book The Great Plains Second Edition written by Walter Prescott Webb and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-08 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Prescott Webb identifies the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as technological adaptations that facilitated Anglo conquest of the arid, treeless region of the Great Plains.
Download or read book Roosevelt The Lion and the Fox 1882 1940 written by James MacGregor Burns and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 1060 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant full-length portrait of Franklin Roosevelt the politician”—the first in an award-winning two-volume biography (The Christian Science Monitor). Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest serving president in United States history, reshaping the country during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II. But before his ascension to the presidency, FDR laid the groundwork for his unprecedented run with decades of canny political maneuvering and steady consolidation of power. In this remarkable New York Times–bestselling biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James MacGregor Burns traces FDR’s rise and the peculiar blend of strength and cunning that made him such a uniquely transformative figure. Weaving together lively narrative and impressive scholarship, Burns reconstructs his youth and education at Groton and Harvard, his relationships with his cousins Theodore and Eleanor, his immersion in New York State politics, and his rise to national prominence, all the way through his first two terms as president, which saw the historic New Deal take hold and the drumbeats of World War II begin. Originally published in 1956, The Lion and the Fox was among the first studies of Roosevelt—and it remains a landmark record of his ambitions, talents, and flaws. Hailed by the New York Times as “a sensitive, shrewd, and challenging book” and by Newsweek as “a case study unmatched in American political writings,” Burns’s stunning achievement is the life story of a fascinating political figure.
Download or read book The Great Plains written by Walter Prescott Webb and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1959-01-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers
Download or read book Sod Houses on the Great Plains written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells how settlers on the treeless plains built houses from the prairie sod itself.
Download or read book Running Out written by Lucas Bessire and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
Download or read book As for Me and My House written by Sinclair Ross and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As For Me and My House is an essential Canadian work--a precise and compelling portrait of our culture, our psyche, and the nature of contemporary art itself, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. In the windswept town of Horizon, an unamed diarist paints a vivid and enthralling picture of prairie life in the Depression era. Atmospheric, intimate, and richly observed, As For Me and My House is a moving meditation on the bittersweet nature of human relationships, on the bonds that tie people together and the undercurrents of feeling that can tear them apart. It is one of Canada's great novels and a landmark in modern fiction.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Great Plains written by David J. Wishart and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have
