National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.

Edward Steinke, with all the ambition and steadfastness of his 24 years, believes in only one thing: Perfect Execution. This is the sales technique from the 1954 masterpiece Classic Sales: Theory and Technique, Ed's secular New Testament. Unfortunately for Ed, he is selling the Brackett 180-X piano organ at the South Exhibition Hall of a large Midwestern state fair, and Barry Steinke, Ed's sullen younger brother and employee, is less than supportive. Between the brothers comes Leila Genet, imaginative but timid, frozen by life, who wanders the hall looking to escape into "the stupid happiness of the Fair." Great American Plain is a novel about the Midwest, middle-class mores, success, and what it means to achieve.

This book uses archaeology to tell 15,000 years of history of the indigenous people of the North American Great Plains.

A magnificent picture of early pioneer life in Kansas and Texas in the '60s and '70s, the dramatic period when the Texan cowboys with their gigantic herds of catle came up along the famous Chisholm Trail to Abileen, Kansas ... Dust cover.

A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers

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.

"Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have