Search -
The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula: Its Role in Shaping American Culture
The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula Its Role in Shaping American Culture Author:Jim Fay, Andrew C. Fortier The tall grass prairie peninsula is Illinois and adjacent margins, northeastern Indiana and the Darby Plains prairies of central Ohio. (See the image on the cover of the book.) It has been and is the center of extraordinary innovation: — 1) About 10,000 years ago people in the very southern part of Illinois introduced a startling innovation; they... more » stopped hunting ice age animals like mastodons and woolly mammoths and devoted themselves to hunting modern game animals.
2) About 7,000 years ago people of the tall grass prairie peninsula probably began cultivating small egg gourds, and in the process established one of the ten or so (depending on the source) cradles of agriculture on the globe.
3) 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.
4) 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.
5) 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.
6) 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.« less