America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghornantelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed insuch abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudesof these animals." In a work that is at once a lyricalevocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veterannaturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory-and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchersand ultimately a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Great Plains with its wildlife intact dazzled Americans and Europeans alike, prompting numerous literary tributes. American Serengeti takes its place alongside these celebratory works, showing us the grazers and predators of the plains against the vast opalescent distances, the blue mountains shimmering on the horizon, the great rippling tracts of yellowed grasslands. Far from the empty "flyover country" of recent times, this landscape is alive with a complex ecology at least 20,000 years old-a continental patrimony whose wonders may not be entirely lost, as recent efforts hold out hope of partial restoration of these historic species. Written by an author who has done breakthrough work on the histories of several of these animals-including bison, wild horses, and coyotes-American Serengeti is as rigorous in its research as it isintimate in its sense of wonder-the most deeply informed, closely observed view we have of the Great Plains' wild heritage.

This highly readable edited collection focuses on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx. Each contributor to this volume explores a different facet of Proulx's striking attention to geography, place, landscape, regional environments, and local economies in her writing. Covering all of her novels and short story collections, scholars from the United States, Canada, and abroad engage in critical analyses of Proulx's new regionalism, use of geographical settings, and themes of displacement and immigration. Taken together, these essays demonstrate Annie Proulx's contribution to new regionalist understandings of place on local, national, and global scales. Readers will come away with a better understanding of Proulx's particular landscapes_particularly those of Wyoming, New England, Texas, and Newfoundland_and the issues surrounding the significance of these regions in contemporary American culture and literature.

This highly readable edited collection focuses on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx. Each contributor to this volume explores a different facet of Proulx's striking attention to geography, place, landscape, regional environments, and local economies in her writing. Covering all of her novels and short story collections, scholars from the United States, Canada, and abroad engage in critical analyses of Proulx's new regionalism, use of geographical settings, and themes of displacement and immigration. Taken together, these essays demonstrate Annie Proulx's contribution to new regionalist understandings of place on local, national, and global scales. Readers will come away with a better understanding of Proulx's particular landscapes particularly those of Wyoming, New England, Texas, and Newfoundland and the issues surrounding the significance of these regions in contemporary American culture and literature."

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness. Distinguished author Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America-a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before. The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity's success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today's "Sixth Extinction" to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades. In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America's animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don't come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans--especially white Americans--began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York's Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down. Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism. An illuminating biography of this extraordinary animal, Coyote America isn't just the story of an animal's survival--it is one of the great epics of our time.

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness. Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before. The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades. In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

As one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century painters, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) is justly renowned for his majestic paintings of the western landscape. Yet Bierstadt was also a painter of history, and his figural works, replete with images of Plains Indians and the American bison, are an important part of his legacy as well. This splendid full-color volume highlights his achievements in chronicling a rapidly changing American West. Born in Germany, Bierstadt rose to prominence as an American artist in the late 1850s and enjoyed nearly two decades of critical success. His paintings propelled him to the forefront of the American art scene, but they also met with reproach from his peers and critics in the press who viewed his painting style as outmoded. Bierstadt's star has both risen and fallen as modern art historians have reconsidered his complex oeuvre. This volume takes a major step in reappraising Bierstadt's contributions by reexamining the artist through a new lens. It shows how Bierstadt conveyed moral messages through his paintings, often to preserve the dignity of Native peoples and call attention to the tragic slaughter of the American bison. More broadly, the book reconsiders the artist's engagement with contemporary political and social debates surrounding wildlife conservation in America, the creation and perpetuation of national parks, and the prospects for the West's indigenous peoples. Bierstadt's final history paintings, including his dual masterworks titled The Last of the Buffalo - a special focus of this volume - stand out as elegiac odes to an earlier era, giving voice to concerns about the intertwined fates of Native peoples and endangered wildlife, especially bison. Along with its rich sampling of Bierstadt's diverse artwork, Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West features informative essays by noted curators, scholars of art history, and historians of the American West.

This spectacular collection of photographs is a follow-up to Wilson's very successful book, Wild Life, which was published in 2014. With 80 percent new work, stunning landscape format design, a new introduction by Wilson about his philosophy and process, and an essay by Dan Flores, author of the New York Times-bestseller Coyote America, The Other World: Animal Portraits will be a welcome sequel and a strong contender in the popular wildlife photography genre. Although he shoots in the studio, Wilson is inspired by the notion of the "authentic encounter," that is, allowing the animal to reveal itself to us rather than imposing our subjective notions on it or on the portrait.

In 1806 President Thomas Jefferson sent cartographer Thomas Freeman and botanist Peter Custis to explore the southen Louisiana Purchase westward to the Rocky Moutnains. Stopped by a Spanish army in what is today extreme southern Oklahoma, they did not complete their mission. President Jefferson minimized their failure by focusing instead on the success of their northern counterparts Lewis and Clark. Hence the fame of Lewis and Clark and the virtual anonymity of Freeman and Custis-until now, thanks to editor Dan L. Flores.

Dan Flores presents the primary documents created by Freeman and Custis during their ill-fated attempt to explore the Louisiana territory and areas west of the Mississippi in 1806.