Download or read book The Life of Prairies and Plains written by Durward L. Allen and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Grasslands Grown written by Molly Patrick Rozum and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Grasslands Grown Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation. Rozum argues that environmental awareness, including its ecological and cultural aspects, is key to forming a sense of place and a regional identity. The two concepts overlap and reinforce each other: place is more local, ecological, and emotional-sensual, and region is more ideational, national, and geographic in tone. This captivating study examines the growth of place and regional identities as they took shape within generations and over the life cycle.

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 The Prairie Dog written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 100 color photos by a professional Texas photographer and science teacher showcase these gregarious rodents in their natural habitat. Graves discusses their varieties, habits, biology, range, and role in the ecosystem. Includes information on habitat decline by state since 1870, and where they can still be seen.

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 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 American Serengeti written by Dan Flores and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed in such abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals." In a work that is at once a lyrical evocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veteran naturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory—and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchers and ultimately a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Great Plains with its wildlife intact dazzled Americans and Europeans alike, prompting numerous literary tributes. American Serengeti takes its place alongside these celebratory works, showing us the grazers and predators of the plains against the vast opalescent distances, the blue mountains shimmering on the horizon, the great rippling tracts of yellowed grasslands. Far from the empty "flyover country" of recent times, this landscape is alive with a complex ecology at least 20,000 years old—a continental patrimony whose wonders may not be entirely lost, as recent efforts hold out hope of partial restoration of these historic species. Written by an author who has done breakthrough work on the histories of several of these animals—including bison, wild horses, and coyotes—American Serengeti is as rigorous in its research as it is intimate in its sense of wonder—the most deeply informed, closely observed view we have of the Great Plains' wild heritage.

Download or read book Blackland Prairies of the Gulf Coastal Plain written by Evan Peacock and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2003-03-05 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a holistic approach, this compilation gathers ecological, historical, and archaeological research written on the distinctive region of the US Southeast called the Gulf coast blackland prairie. Ranging from the last glacial period to the present day, the case studies provide a broad picture of how the area has changed through time and been modified by humans, first with nomadic bands of Indians trailing the grazing animals and then by Euro-American settlers who farmed the rich agricultural area. Contemporary impacts include industrialization, aquaculture, population growth, land reclamation, and wildlife management.

Download or read book Field Guide to Wildflowers of Nebraska and the Great Plains written by Jon Farrar and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2011-12-16 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mixed-grass prairies of the Panhandle in the west, to the Sandhills prairie and mixed-grass prairies in central Nebraska, to the tallgrass prairies in the east, the state is home to hundreds of wildflower species, yet the primary guide to these flowers has been out of print for almost two decades. Now back in a second edition with updated nomenclature, refined plant descriptions, better photographs where improvements were called for, and a new design, Jon Farrar’s Field Guide to Wildflowers of Nebraska and the Great Plains, originally published by NEBRASKAland magazine and the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, is a visual treat and educational guide to some of the region’s showiest and most interesting wildflowers. Organizing species by color, Farrar provides scientific, common, and family names; time of flowering; distribution both for Nebraska specifically and for the Great Plains in general; and preferred habitat including soil type and plant community from roadsides to woodlands to grasslands. Descriptions of each species are succinct and accessible; Farrar packs a surprising amount of information into a compact space. For many species, he includes intriguing notes about edibility, medicinal uses by Native Americans and early pioneers, similar species and varieties, hybridization, and changes in status as plants become uncommon or endangered. Superb color photographs allow each of the 274 wildflowers to be easily identified and pen-and-ink illustrations provide additional details for many species. It is a joy to have this new edition riding along on car seats and in backpacks helping naturalists at all levels of expertise explore prairies, woodlands, and wetlands in search of those ever-changing splashes of color we call wildflowers.

Download or read book Clearing the Plains written by James William Daschuk and published by University of Regina Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples. Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day. The prose is gripping, the analysis is incisive, and the narrative is so chilling that it leaves its reader stunned and disturbed. For days after reading it, I was unable to shake a profound sense of sorrow. This is fearless, evidence-driven history at its finest." -Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Pox Americana "Required reading for all Canadians." -Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "Clearly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of indigenous North America." -J.R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires

Download or read book The Greater Plains written by Brian Frehner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Greater Plains tells a new story of a region, stretching from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, where the environments are as varied as the myriad ways people have inhabited them. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with a sometimes plentiful and sometimes foreboding landscape, from the Native Americans who first shaped the prairies with fire to twentieth-century oil regimes whose pipelines linked the region to the world. The Greater Plains moves beyond the narrative of ecological desperation that too often defines the region in scholarly works and in popular imagination. Using the lenses of grasses, animals, water, and energy, the contributors reveal tales of human adaptation through technologies ranging from the travois to bookkeeping systems and hybrid wheat. Transnational in its focus and interdisciplinary in its scholarship, The Greater Plains brings together leading historians, geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists to chronicle a past rich with paradoxical successes and failures, conflicts and cooperation, but also continual adaptation to the challenging and ever-shifting environmental conditions of the North American heartland.

Download or read book The Life of Prairies and Plains written by Durward Leon Allen and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Commerce of the Prairies written by Josiah Gregg and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Trees Prairies and People written by Wilmon Henry Droze and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Depression of the 1930s set the stage for "the greatest afforestation program the world has known" when the Forest Service was given the task of planting shelterbelts from Texas to Canada in a zone a hundred miles wide. The venture, known as the Prairie States Forestry Project or the Shelterbelt Project, resulted in the planting of millions of trees between 1834 and 1942. Today, the millions of trees planted in the Depression stand as a monument to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who originated the idea of the project, and to friends of environmental concern everywhere. Not all the trees are living, and many of the belts have been removed in the interest of technological advances in Plains' agriculture or the farmer's decision to increase his planting acreage. Conservationists and spokesmen in government have become alarmed by the destruction of the belts. The time has come to re-evaluate the importance of trees to the environment of the prairies and plains of mid-America, for recent droughts again created a need to plant trees to combat erosion and to make the region more hospitable to the people who live there and who provide the world with its bread.

Download or read book Heartland written by David Plowden and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Midwestern landscape is celebrated by the noted photographer in magnificent reproductions of his work. Walt Whitman celebrated the American plains thus: “While I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.” When David Plowden traveled from his native East Coast to the Midwest, he was stunned by the landscape Whitman describes. In the years that followed he became enthralled by its vast open spaces and wildly changing skies. Fields of wheat, grain, and corn, farms and grain elevators became the subjects of his photographs. The best of his work over the past thirty-five years is presented here, impeccably reproduced in a generous format that does justice to the work of one of America’s foremost photographers and printmakers.

Download or read book Prairie Fire written by Julie Courtwright and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive environmental history of prairie fire on the Great Plains. Traces the history of both natural and intentional fires from pre-Columbian Native American practices to the current use of controlled burns as an effective land management tool. Shows the impact fire has had in shaping the identity of both the Great Plains people and their land.