Donald Worster’s 1979 Dust Bowl was a pioneering exploration of a profound ecological and economic crisis. History, for Worster, involves place: that context in which stories unfold, whose contours are shaped both by nature and by technology.

Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains cuts across geology, physiography, climatology, botany, zoology, anthropology, history, and literature to venture to the very boundaries of what historians are comfortable in calling history.