The Greater Plains Rethinking A Regions Environmental Histories Brian Frehner by Brian Frehner, Kathleen A. Brosnan 9781496226471, 149622647X instant download after payment.

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 rich and paradoxical past of successes and failure, of conflicts and cooperation, but always of adaptation to the challenging and ever-shifting environmental conditions of the North American heartland.