The Great Plains

The Great Plains is a challenging place for visitors to make sense of, and this collection of chapters reveals a rich and timely tapestry of often complicated regional cultural activities, especially because much of the analysis of Great Plains regional cultural practices has never been collected in one place. Environmental extremes, the forcible removal of Native populations to the region and within the region, the in‐migration of non‐Native Euro‐ and African Americans, the dramatic environmental, economic, and cultural impact of the 1930s Dust Bowl, and the region’s low population density and population decline, hand in hand with its isolation from large metropolitan centers, together have profoundly shaped cultural life in the region. The ways in which the Great Plains has been represented and the general waxing and waning in regionalism have also shaped people’s understanding of regional life in the Plains. The various lenses of architecture, art, ecology and the environment, ethnicity, fashion, film and theater, folklore, food, language, literature, music, religion, and sports and recreation, suggest a slower, more thoughtful navigation of this place and a joyful exploration of this dramatic region, the Great Plains.