The Webb Thesis

The Webb Thesis: Adaptation to the Great Plains Environment

The central thesis of The Great Plains, Walter P. Webb's master work published in 1931, is human adaptation to the physical environment. Webb said that in order for people to live on the plains, all the institutions and tools developed in the eastern parts of the United States had to be adapted to the environment of the Great Plains--which was level, treeless, and semiarid.

Carried to extreme, the Webb thesis becomes a form of environmental determinism that both offends traditional scholarly conceptions of multiple causation in history and also deprives historical subjects of the assumption of free will. Considered thoughtfully, however, the Webb thesis enlightens many of the important commonalities of regional life.

Examples of the Webb Thesis in Action
Eastern institution or tool Great Plains adaptation
Kentucky long rifle Colt's revolver
rail fence barbed wire
log cabin sod house (or tarpaper shack)
conventional tillage dry farming (later conservation tillage)
dug wells and buckets drilled wells and windmills
binder header
gates cattle guards
small, diversified farms large, single-crop farms

PowerPoint Presentation on the Webb Thesis

PowerPoint Presentation on Webb in Austin