ABSTRACT
Webb’s approach to history-like Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis (which Webb claimed not to have read prior to writing The Great Plains )—has been attacked over the years. Fred Shannon’s 200-page savaging of Webb’s book in 1940 was the first of those critiques, made all the more famous by Webb’s laconic refusal to acknowledge Shannon’s points: his response to Shannon’s critique was that he had conceived and written The Great Plains not as history, but as art! In our own time, even his sympathizers acknowledge that Webb’s basic ideas were an exercise in environmental determinism, an approach that geographers and anthropologists had long since abandoned. Somewhat in the manner of an intellectual Ulysses S.Grant, it has been asserted, Webb was moved to write big idea books like The Great Plains and later The Great Frontier (1964) essentially because he lacked the education to know better.
