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The first lecture for the class took us through a quick overview of a few of the first people to study the plains. These people included Turner, Innis , Bessey and Stegner. First we discussed Wallace Stegner and his book Wolf Willow. This gave way to the idea of why we study history, for judgement ad identity, then what history is, as a way of making sence of the world.
Then we discussed how Turner was the first to study the American plains, saying that if you look at the plains you will see "successive waves of settlement". Turner also believed that the frontier of America was a safety valve for cultural and social difference, if it ran too high then the supressed party would just move away.
Then we talked about Innis and the staple theory. Innis was an economic historian that believed in order to be a country you needed to be self-sufficient in all of the staples of life, thus the canadian plains made it a whole country. Innis studied the place of the plains in Canadian history as they pretained to the nation.
Then we learned about grassland ecology and Charles Bessey and his students at the U of Nebraska. They were interested in the study of the prairies as an ecological climax. We also talked about how range management is the applied understanding of grassland ecology.
We also discussed Walter P. Webb and his ideas about adaptation being the key to life on the plains. Webb also believed that human concious choice led to rapid change in the adaptation to the plains.
Towards the end of the first lecture we talked about multi-culturalism on the plains and discussed how we need use continental regionalism, a blend of American Enviromentalism and Canadian Multi-culturalism, to study plains history.
We ended the lecture comming to the conclusion that we would use the four source of regional culture to look at Great Plains history. The four sources were; Cultural History, Environmental Adaptation, Technological Innovation, and The Metropolis.
One of the things that I found the most interesting about this lecture were that The United Stated and Canada had such different ways of studing the plains even though they are not really seperated off for Canada and The United States but rather seperated by an imaginary line. Also I found the idea of the four sources as a way of looking at things on the plains to be an incredibly interesting way of trying to study history and look forward to trying it out.