Kathleen A. Brosnan – författare

The American West, from the beginning of Euro-American settlement, has been shaped by diverse ideas about how to utilize physical space and natural environments to create cohesive, sometimes exclusive community identities. When westerners developed their towns, they constructed spaces and cultural identities that reflected alternative understandings of modern urbanity. The essays in City Dreams, Country Schemes utilize an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways that westerners conceptualized, built, and inhabited urban, suburban, and exurban spaces in the twentieth century. The contributors examine such topics as the attractions of open space and rural gentrification in shaping urban development; the role of tourism in developing national parks, historical sites, and California’s Napa Valley; and the roles of public art, gender, and ethnicity in shaping urban centers. City Dreams, Country Schemes reveals the values and expectations that have shaped the West and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

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.