During this period, the Great Plains was understood and represented in terms of its physical and environmental characteristics. The environmental constraints that dominated the region’s migrants in the nineteenth century were a primary lens through which to understand the region. This environmental lens drew upon climate, physiognomy, flora, and fauna to distinguish itself from other regions.4 There were also efforts by sociologists to work in the same way to unify the region by looking at the social environment. As the regional scholar Frederick Luebke has claimed, the works of historians and sociologists were often underpinned by the work of geographers who also sought to articulate regional homogeneity.
However, by the 1950s, regionalism in American culture had fallen out of favor because Cold War ideology rejected regional division, differentiation, and diversity in exchange for the celebration of and study about national unity. As the economic and ecological ravages of the Dust Bowl abated and the war years ended, a period came when many commentators considered regionalism finished. In 1957, writer Wright Morris declared regions dead: “The only regions left are those the artist must imagine. They lie beyond the usual forms of salvage. No matter where we go, in America today, we shall find what we left behind.”5
However, the wholesale rejection of regionalism was somewhat mitigated in the 1960s. In the midst of much civil rights tension, culture was understood to be the shaper of regionalism, and the focus of regional study shifted to the ways in which different groups brought their cultural sensibilities to a region, and how cultural traditions diffused through these regions. In Great Plains research the role of the immigrant cultures to the region became a major focus, cultural and regional geographers began to map food culture, religion, and linguistics as markers of culture and regionalism, and the role of the environment was placed into a cultural context. One of the leaders of cultural regionalism, historian Frederick Luebke, made the case that
The effect of the older scholarship was to reveal regional uniformities, just as the newer scholarship stresses interregional variation. Each discerns relationships that are beyond the analytical power of the other. Regions are therefore best conceptualized in terms of the interplay between environment and culture; they are best described and analyzed through appropriate comparisons in time, space, and culture.6
