The Great Plains

Walter Prescott Webb

Aug 2022 · U of Nebraska Press

About this ebook

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University



This iconic description of the interaction between the vast central plains of the continent and the white Americans who moved there in the mid-nineteenth century has endured as one of the most influential, widely known, and controversial works in western history since its first publication in 1931. Arguing that "the Great Plains environment . . . constitutes a geographic unity whose influences have been so powerful as to put a characteristic mark upon everything that survives within its borders," Walter Prescott Webb identifies the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as technological adaptations that facilitated Anglo conquest of the arid, treeless region. Webb draws on history, anthropology, geography, demographics, climatology, and economics in arguing that the 98th Meridian constitutes an institutional fault line at which "practically every institution that was carried across it was either broken and remade or else greatly altered."



This new edition of one of the foundational works of western American history features an introduction by Great Plains historian Andrew R. Graybill and a new index and updated design.

About the author

A regional historian of imagination and vision, Walter Prescott Webb presented his studies of the frontier, the Great Plains, and his beloved Texas in terms that enhanced the reader's understanding of the entire national experience. Born into a poor East Texas family at a time when the plains were succumbing to the pressure of white civilization, he was a true product of his environment and liked to say that he had begun research on his classical study The Great Plains (1931) "when I was four." Trained at the University of Texas, he began teaching there as well in 1918; yet a series of misadventures prevented him from receiving his Ph.D. until 1932. In 1938 he was Harkness lecturer in American history at the University of London and several years later Harmsworth Professor of American history at Oxford University. Although Webb's work excited controversy and sharp criticism in some quarters, it inspired significant new thinking about the role of regionalism and the environment in the nation's history. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1958, Webb spoke of "History as High Adventure," an apt reflection of his lifelong approach to his work.