Atlas of the Great Plains
Atlas of the Great Plains

Author: Stephen J. Lavin

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2011-07

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0803215363

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2011 Booklist Editor's Choice, reference category The Great Plains, stretching northward from Texas into Canada, is a region that has been understudied and overlooked. The Atlas of the Great Plains, however, brings a new focus to North America’s midcontinent. With more than three hundred original full-color maps, accompanied by extended explanatory text, this collection chronicles the history of the Great Plains, including political and social developments. Far more than simply the geography of the region, this atlas explores a myriad of subjects from Native Americans to settlement patterns, agricultural ventures to voting records, and medical services to crime rates. These detailed and beautifully designed maps convey the significance of the region, capturing the essence of its land and life. The only current and comprehensive atlas of the Great Plains region, it is also the first atlas to include both the United States and Canada, showing the region’s full length and breadth.

The Western Range Revisited
The Western Range Revisited

Author: Debra L. Donahue

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780806132983

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Livestock grazing is the most widespread commercial use of federal public lands. The image of a herd grazing on Bureau of Land Management or U.S. Forest Service lands is so traditional that many view this use as central to the history and culture of the West. Yet the grazing program costs far more to administer than it generates in revenues, and grazing affects all other uses of public lands, causing potentially irreversible damage to native wildlife and vegetation. The Western Range Revisited proposes a landscape-level strategy for conserving native biological diversity on federal rangelands, a strategy based chiefly on removing livestock from large tracts of arid BLM lands in ten western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming. Drawing from range ecology, conservation biology, law, and economics, Debra L. Donahue examines the history of federal grazing policy and the current debate on federal multiple-use, sustained-yield policies and changing priorities for our public lands. Donahue, a lawyer and wildlife biologist, uses existing laws and regulations, historical documents, economic statistics, and current scientific thinking to make a strong case for a land-management strategy that has been, until now, "unthinkable." A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, The Western Range Revisited demonstrates that conserving biodiversity by eliminating or reducing livestock grazing makes economic sense, is ecologically expedient, and can be achieved under current law.

This Land, This Nation
This Land, This Nation

Author: Sarah T. Phillips

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-03-05

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1139462229

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This 2007 book combines political with environmental history to present conservation policy as a critical arm of New Deal reform, one that embodied the promises and limits of midcentury American liberalism. It interprets the natural resource programs of the 1930s and 1940s as a set of federal strategies aimed at rehabilitating the economies of agricultural areas. The New Dealers believed that the country as a whole would remain mired in depression as long as its farmers remained poorer than its urban residents, and these politicians and policymakers set out to rebuild rural life and raise rural incomes with measures tied directly to conservation objectives - land retirement, soil restoration, flood control, and affordable electricity for homes and industries. In building new constituencies for the environmental initiatives, resource administrators and their liberal allies established the political justification for an enlarged federal government and created the institutions that shaped the contemporary rural landscape.

The Earth as Transformed by Human Action
The Earth as Transformed by Human Action

Author: B. L. Turner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993-01-29

Total Pages: 740

ISBN-13: 9780521446303

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The Earth as Transformed by Human Action is the culmination of a mammoth undertaking involving the examination of the toll our continual strides forward, technical and social, take on our world. The purpose of such a study is to document the changes in the biosphere that have taken place over the last 300 years, to contrast global patterns of change to those appearing on a regional level, and to explain the major human forces that have driven these changes. The first section deals strictly with the major human forces of the past 300 years and the second is a detailed account of the transformations of the global environment wrought by human action. The final section examines a range of perspectives and theories that purport to explain human actions with regard to the biosphere.

Termination Revisited
Termination Revisited

Author: Kenneth R. Philp

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2002-05-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780803287693

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**CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book** "[Philp] presents a well-balanced account of the legal, political, and economic relationships between Native Americans and the U.S. government during the period shortly before the Indian Reorganization Act (1935) to . . . Termination, the program to dissolve tribal relationships with the federal government. . . . Philp brilliantly ties together the shifting stances of governmental and tribal officials."-Choice. "Termination Revisited is, without question, an important book. It will be required reading for any serious student of modern Indian history."-Nevada Historical Society Quarterly. "The best account we have to date of policy formation during the Truman administration. But there is more. Philp's narrative introduces actors who have not figured prominently in previous accounts of the period. . . . He also illuminates reservation life and politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Philp's book charts the course for many new studies come."-Western Historical Quarterly. "Philp's book is gracefully written, founded on nearly thirty years of research, and finely balanced in its assessments. This history makes sense out of much of the nonsense touching lives of several hundreds of thousands of American Indians in the twentieth century."-Oregon Historical Quarterly. Kenneth R. Philp is a professor of history at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is the author of John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954.

Archaeology on the Great Plains
Archaeology on the Great Plains

Author: W. Raymond Wood

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 1998-07-29

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0700610006

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Stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to central Canada, North America's great interior grasslands were home to nomadic hunters and semisedentary farmers for almost 11,500 years before the arrival of Euro-American settlers. Pan-continental trade between these hunters and horticulturists helped make the lifeways of Plains Indians among the richest and most colorful of Native Americans. This volume is the first attempt to synthesize current knowledge on the cultural history of the Great Plains since Wedel's Prehistoric Man on the Great Plains became the standard reference on the subject almost forty years ago. Fourteen authors have undertaken the task of examining archaeological phenomena through time and by region to present a systematic overview of the region's human history. Focusing on habitat and cultural diversity and on the changing archaeological record, they reconstruct how people responded to the varying environment, climate, and biota of the grasslands to acquire the resources they needed to survive. The contributors have analyzed archaeological artifacts and other evidence to present a systematic overview of human history in each of the five key Plains regions: Southern, Central, Middle Missouri, Northeastern, and Northwestern. They review the Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Plains Village peoples and tell how their cultural traditions have continued from ancient to modern times. Each essay covers technology, diet, settlement, and adaptive patterns to give readers an understanding of the differences and similarities among groups. The story of Plains peoples is brought into historical focus by showing the impacts of Euro-American contact, notably acquisition of the horse and exposure to new diseases. Featuring 85 maps and illustrations, Archaeology on the Great Plains is an exceptional introduction to the field for students and an indispensable reference for specialists. It enhances our understanding of how the Plains shaped the adaptive strategies of peoples through time and fosters a greater appreciation for their cultures.

Encyclopedia of Prehistory
Encyclopedia of Prehistory

Author: Peter N. Peregrine

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2001-12-31

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 9780306462603

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The Encyclopedia of Prehistory represents temporal dimension. Major traditions are an attempt to provide basic information also defined by a somewhat different set of on all archaeologically known cultures, sociocultural characteristics than are eth covering the entire globe and the entire nological cultures. Major traditions are prehistory of humankind. It is designed as defined based on common subsistence a tool to assist in doing comparative practices, sociopolitical organization, and research on the peoples of the past. Most material industries, but language, ideology, of the entries are written by the world's and kinship ties play little or no part in foremost experts on the particular areas their definition because they are virtually and time periods. unrecoverable from archaeological con The Encyclopedia is organized accord texts. In contrast, language, ideology, and ing to major traditions. A major tradition kinship ties are central to defining ethno is defined as a group of populations sharing logical cultures.

The Big Empty
The Big Empty

Author: R. Douglas Hurt

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 081654462X

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The Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composition, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities—Denver, Lincoln, and Fort Worth—that made a difference in the history of the environment, politics, and agriculture of the Great Plains. Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book creates a sweeping survey of contested race relations, radical politics, and agricultural prosperity and decline during the twentieth century. This narrative shows that even though Great Plains history is fraught with personal and group tensions, violence, and distress, the twentieth century also brought about compelling social, economic, and political change. The only book of its kind, this account will be of interest to historians studying the region and to anyone inspired by the story of the men and women who found an opportunity for a better life in the Great Plains.

The Middle Ground
The Middle Ground

Author: Richard White

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 1139495682

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An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.