What and where is the Great Plains region?

What and where is the Great Plains region? To a person who is entering the Plains, it seems to stretch without boundaries, with enormous skies and expansive, open uninterrupted landscape. Indeed, in terms of its physical definition, the political defined boundaries of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma are too limiting. Regions are not merely the result of the physical environment, they are also a result of culture. However, this is equally slippery. For example, a sense of region is not always shared equally amongst inhabitants. In my own work on Great Plains regionalism, I asked Plains inhabitants about the ways in which they think of their own region. Though some responded that they lived in the Great Plains others saw themselves living in what they termed the High Plains, while others saw no distinction between themselves and the more general term the Midwest. Thus, not everyone in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma recognizes herself or himself to be in the Great Plains. However, when asked to describe their region, residents often share similar definitions of their region as shaped by climate, economics, history, and culture. Regions are rarely simple to identify or embrace. However, they are a fascinating and useful tool to understand how places came to be, how they function, what makes them special, and what issues connect them to other places. East to west, an environmentally defined region stretches from around the ninety‐eighth meridian (altitude 2,000 feet; though some choose the one hundredth meridian), to the Rocky Mountains (altitude 7,000 feet) in the west. This eastward‐sloping, treeless, semiarid, short‐grass plateau’s annual rainfall is between thirteen and twenty inches, and the region’s continental climate creates an environment of extremes, excessive heat and cold, and violent weather patterns. But the physical extension of the region is only one way in which this landscape can be understood. Indeed, as Sonja Rossum and Stephen Lavin’s work on mapping the region shows, maps of cultural characteristics of the region are usually smaller and are differently shaped from environmentally defined maps.1 In this exploration of the Great Plains we draw together architecture, art, ecology and the environment, ethnicity, fashion and dress, film and theater, folklore, food, language, literature, music, religion, and sports and recreation not to visually map the region but to use narrative to map this space that embraces the regional definition of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma and also extends beyond these state boundaries.