The Last Days of the Rainbelt (MP-106)

The Last Days of the Rainbelt (MP-106) David J. Wishart, 2013, 202 pp., size 6" x 9". Description: David J. Wishart’s The Last Days of the Rainbelt is the sobering tale of the rapid rise and decline of the settlement of the western Great Plains. History finds its voice in interviews with elderly residents of the region by Civil Works Administration employees in 1933 and 1934. Evidence similarly emerges from land records, climate reports, census records, and diaries, as Wishart deftly tracks the expansion of westward settlement across the central plains and into the Rainbelt. Through an examination of migration patterns, land laws, town-building, and agricultural practices, Wishart re-creates the often-difficult life of settlers in a semiarid region who undertook the daunting task of adapting to a new environment. His book brings this era of American settlement and failure on the western Great Plains fully into the scope of historical memory. David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains and Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians and the author of An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. The Last Days of the Rainbelt is a publication of the University of Nebraska Press.