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The Buffalo Commons: Great Plains Residents' Responses To A Radical Vision, Amanda Rees

Great Plains Quarterly

The American Great Plains has gained and shed various regional meanings since Euro-American exploration began. From a desert to a garden to a dust bowl to a breadbasket, this region's identity has shifted radically and dramatically over the last 200 years. In Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, he argues that this Plains state can be understood as empty and bare: "The blank landscape prompted dreams of a blank-slate society, a place where institutes might be remade as humans saw fit." Authors such as Jonathan Raban have characterized the Great Plains as a whole in this manner. Raban …