New from Stipes Publishing...

The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula:
Its Role in Shaping American Culture

 

The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula: Its Role in Shaping American Culture by Jim Fay with Andrew C. Fortier, 2007 ISBN 978-1-58874-666-5 List Price: $25.80 Stipes Publishing L.L.C.  [ordering info]

Overview
The tall grass prairie peninsula is Illinois and adjacent margins, northeastern Indiana and the Darby Plains prairies of central Ohio. It has been and is the center of extraordinary innovation.

• About 10,000 years ago people in the very southern part of Illinois introduced a startling innovation; they stopped hunting ice age animals like mastodons and woolly mammoths and devoted themselves to hunting modern game animals.
• About 7,000 years ago people of the tall grass prairie peninsula began cultivating small egg gourds, and in the process established one of the four (or five or seven, depending on the source) cradles of agriculture on the globe.
• Thousands of years ago the tall grass prairie peninsula was central to the development and spread of Algonquin language and culture.  The Proto-Algonquians called themselves elenyiwa, 'the ordinary people,' a term reflected in the modern French spelling Illinois.
• In 1833 Jonathan Baldwin Turner came from Yale to begin a teaching career he assumed would be spent listening to recitations of Latin and Greek.  But the prairie changed him, and he invented the liberal education and the modern research university.
• Abraham Lincoln was a disciple and colleague of Turner, and he took his prairie perceptions and values to Washington.  It is sometimes said he re-invented America with the 272 words of the Gettysburg Address.
• Jazz was just a local style of music in New Orleans or a wacky novelty or exotic jungle music elsewhere in America until it passed into the mainstream on the river boats on the Mississippi between Memphis and Alton. And then Louis Armstrong brought it from there to Chicago, a city uniquely prepared to embrace it.


Why? Why did all this innovation happen here?  One of the basic assumptions of the study of innovation diffusion is that innovation is much more effectively developed and diffused along an east-west axis than along a north-south axis. And when rivers are the main highway of communication, as they were in prehistory, a river system spanning an east-west expanse is a much more effective highway of innovation than a river system running north or south.

The tall grass prairie peninsula, located at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers, is the center of an east-west system of rivers that span thousands of miles.  Indeed, a traveler can travel virtually from coast to coast on this river system with only a couple of very modest overland treks. One of these treks would be from the headwaters of rivers of the Pacific northwest to the headwaters of the Missouri in western Idaho. The other would be any one of a number of treks from the headwaters of the Ohio and its tributaries to the headwaters of rivers of the east coast.

Moreover, this highway of innovation passes through areas that are both ecologically and culturally very diverse, rich and fertile, as is the prairie peninsula itself.  Indeed, the tall grass prairie peninsula is the scene of some of the richest soil on earth.

And finally, the tall grass prairie peninsula was central to a rich array of cultures, but, by and large, not the center of any one culture. So these wide open spaces of rich fertile soil and abundant resources were also wide open for new ideas to take root and grow. These new ideas would never have had that advantage in places where a single culture defined the perceptions and values.

Accompanying Tutorials
A variety of hypertext tutorials are currently posted on-line to supplement the book. More will be posted as they are developed. The tutorials are to two kinds, 1) full tutorials that present/review a significant body of information from the book and 2) "quick blitz" quizzes that are designed to be a quick (and fun) review.

The following are currently posted:
 

1)--	An overview tutorial on the "Portrait of Prairie" and "Tall Grass Prairie Ecology" chapters  http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/PortraitEcolTutor
2)--	A prairie plants "blitz quiz"  http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/PlantBlitz
3)--	A full tutorial on identification of surface collected lithic artifacts  http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/PointTutor
4)--	A quick "blitz quiz" on lithic artifact identification http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/PointBlitz
5)--	A full tutorial on "The Peopling of America" and "Distinctions About Cultures" chapters  http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/CulturePeoplingTutor

Tailoring the Book for Specific Courses
Stipes Publishing welcomes ideas for revising or tailoring textbooks for specific courses. For example, as it stands, this book is very appropriate for a course in area studies or in anthropology.   If a couple of chapters dealing with the historical era were eliminated and perhaps a couple of chapters dealing with archaeology were added, it would be very appropriate for an archaeology course.

If you would like to write a chapter or two to be included in a textbook for a course you teach, or if you would like to discuss other such alterations, contact the author at jfay@prairienet.org.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Portrait of the Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula
3. Comprehensive Knowledge
4. Tall Grass Prairie Ecology
5. Prairie Plants
6. The Prairie Peninsula: A Cradle of Agriculture
7. Making Some Objective Distinctions About Cultures
8. The Peopling of America
9. The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula in Prehistory, by Andrew C. Fortier
10. Lithic Artifacts
11. Innovation and Innovation Diffusion
12. The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula in History
• Minerva’s Owl, The Prophet and Tecumseh
• Black Hawk: The Unlikely Icon
• Jonathan Baldwin Turner: the Man Who Invented the Modern Research University
• The Synthesis of Jazz: Louis Armstrong and the Ladies
13. Notes


Document Information
This document: www.prairienet.org/prairienations/TGPP.html
Author: Jim Fay, Ph.D.
Home page: www.prairienet.org/prairienations/index.htm
Questions or comments to: jfay@prairienet.org