Julie Courtwright. Prairie Fire

The smell of burning pastures still kindles memories from my childhood in Oklahoma. People living in the Great Plains have long used fire to sustain the grasslands, where humans burned away old grass to make way for new growth. From time to time, lightning strikes and dry seasons spark an accidental fire. With smoke drifting across an open sky, fires constitute a regular occurrence in many parts of the American West. Julie Courtwright considers the significance of fire in her synthesis of Great Plains history. Her project began as a dissertation before evolving into a book. In a play on words, she describes herself as obsessed with “smokin' grass.” She meditates upon the personal narratives of folks ostensibly exhilarated, frightened, devastated, and sustained by pyrogenic ecology in the region. In terms of group identity, she argues that fire “bound Plains people to each other and to the prairies themselves” (p. 6).

Accidental · Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Ecosystem · Fire regime · Geography · Identity (music) · Narrative · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies