Homesteading the Plains PDF Download

Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Homesteading the Plains PDF full book. Access full book title Homesteading the Plains by Richard Edwards. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.

Homesteading the Plains

Homesteading the Plains PDF Author: Richard Edwards
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496202295
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
"Homesteading the Plains offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public's perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars' harshly negative and dismissive treatment. Homesteading the Plains reexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation's four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, Homesteading the Plainsdemonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public's perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed. Homesteading the Plainsprovides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy. "--

Homesteading the Plains

Homesteading the Plains PDF Author: Richard Edwards
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496202295
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
"Homesteading the Plains offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public's perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars' harshly negative and dismissive treatment. Homesteading the Plains reexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation's four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, Homesteading the Plainsdemonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public's perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed. Homesteading the Plainsprovides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy. "--

The Greater Plains

The Greater Plains PDF Author: Brian Frehner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496227077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
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.

Prairie Fire

Prairie Fire PDF Author: Julie Courtwright
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
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.

The Great Plains

The Great Plains PDF Author: Walter Prescott Webb
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers

The Plains and the People

The Plains and the People PDF Author: Virginia Lobdell Jennings
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781565546165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The residents of The Plains should be proud ofthe part their ancestors played in creating the colorful history of thissection of Louisiana. The Old World cultures of France, Spain, England,Ireland, and Scotland blended to form the gracious, warmhearted people whoinhabit this beautiful plainsland today.From the area's beginnings, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and onto near present day, the history of The Plains is presented in exacting detail.It is further complemented by family genealogies and listings of extanttombstones.

Great Plains

Great Plains PDF Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466828889
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
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.

Rising from the Plains

Rising from the Plains PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708509
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee continues his Annals of the Former World series about the geology of North America along the fortieth parallel with Rising from the Plains. This third volume presents another exciting geological excursion with an engaging account of life—past and present—in the high plains of Wyoming. Sometimes it is said of geologists that they reflect in their professional styles the sort of country in which they grew up. Nowhere could that be more true than in the life of a geologist born in the center of Wyoming and raised on an isolated ranch. This is the story of that ranch, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, and of David Love, the geologist who grew up there, at home with the composition of the high country in the way that someone growing up in a coastal harbor would be at home with the vagaries of the sea.

The Great Plains During World War II

The Great Plains During World War II PDF Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803224095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
An in-depth examination of the effects of World War II on the Great Plains states brings to life the voices and experiences of the residents of the region in recounting the stories of the daily concerns of ordinary people.

Thirty-one Years on the Plains and in the Mountains

Thirty-one Years on the Plains and in the Mountains PDF Author: William F. Drannan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 750

Book Description
Howes and others give scathing review of this work as unreliable. Drannan's wife may have actually written most of the book, based on her husband's stories. Drannan has himself as the rescuer of Olive Oatman, and a companion of Kit Carson.

Lewis and Clark on the Great Plains

Lewis and Clark on the Great Plains PDF Author:
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803276185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
A beautifully rendered reference guide to the Great Plains portion of the famous expedition through the American West highlights the explorer's remarkable encounters with previously undocumented flora and fauna as they moved through the Plains region. Original. (Biology & Natural History)