Review ID: CBB496772690

Review of "The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories" (2024)

unapi

The study of the Great Plains has done much to help define the field of environmental history, especially in the United States. And because histories of “dust, drought, and declension” dominated studies of, and ways of thinking about, the Great Plains, the tension between competing linear narratives of progress and decline also became highly influential among environmental historians over the past three decades. In this new edited collection, Brian Frehner and Kathleen Brosnan bring together a diverse group of scholars from multiple disciplines to demonstrate that this long-standing approach to the study of Great Plains environmental history is changing in favor of “adaptation, persistence, preservation, and sustainability” (xv). Taken together, the sixteen essays that comprise the collection effectively capture the state of the field of Great Plains environmental history. There is much scholarship of significant value emerging from a variety of disciplines and approaches that challenge standard historiographical assumptions. Indeed, the field, like the collection itself, is so large and broad that it is difficult to explain coherently. The collection goes a long way in sketching out the scope of the field, and the editors have done important work in framing the contributions in a way that reflect the authors’ various challenges to the region's dominant historiographical axiom of disaster and decline. The breadth of what is included in the collection, however, sometimes stretches the category of environmental history to the point that it begins to lose explanatory power. The editors do a good job of lending structure to the diversity of scholarship, but like the state of the field itself, they struggle to provide coherence to such a diverse array of new approaches to Great Plains environmental history.

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Review Of

Book Brian Frehner; Kathleen A. Brosnan (2021) The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories. unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB496772690/

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