The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century

Modern American West

by R. Douglas Hurt

The Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composition, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities—Denver, Lincoln, and Fort Worth—that made a difference in the history of the environment, politics, and agriculture of the Great Plains.

Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book creates a sweeping survey of contested race relations, radical politics, and agricultural prosperity and decline during the twentieth century. This narrative shows that even though Great Plains history is fraught with personal and group tensions, violence, and distress, the twentieth century also brought about compelling social, economic, and political change.

The only book of its kind, this account will be of interest to historians studying the region and to anyone inspired by the story of the men and women who found an opportunity for a better life in the Great Plains.

Genres: History

344 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

R. Douglas Hurt is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies at Iowa State University in Ames. He is the author of numerous books, including Nathan Boone and the American Frontier and Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie, both available from the University of Missouri Press.

Reviews

[Susan Wyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very informative read about all aspects of the challenges the residents as well as the government had to confront in the Homesteading and Dust Bowl era of the Great Plains. The assaults on the Native Americans was extremely sad and disheartening-- pushing them farther and farther away from their homelands with the flood of white Great Plains homesteaders during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What the Homestead Act and ripping up the native grasslands to farm in too-arid an area did to the Native Americans and to the environment is a mar on our country's history, not to mention the homesteaders themselves who suffered through the droughts and horrid dust storms. Hurt's book is loaded with facts and figures that really tell the story of what the Homestead and Dust Bowl eras were really like. Excellent information but a hard read.

[Marvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A competent but dry as dust (pun intended) survey of the economic, political, and environmental history of the Great Plains in the 20th century. There's no encompassing theme or argument, though the author does occasionally repeat an observation often made by other historians of the Great Plains and the West: although the region is inhabited by people whose voting record is marked by hostility to the federal government, the region has benefited disproportionately from federal spending, regularly leading the nation in the proportion of federal tax dollars returned to the region as compared to tax dollars contributed. There is also welcome attention to the urban as well as rural history of the region and to the continuing history of Indians in the region. Best read in small doses, I can't imagine anyone who wasn't assigned to do so reading this from cover to cover over a short period of time.