Walter Prescott Webb
After the United States dispatched troops to Europe, Webb moved to Oxford to accept a chair at the university as its Harmsworth Professor of American History.
The sitting University of Texas president, Homer P. Raimey, defended the fired professors on the grounds of economic freedom.
[9] Webb's father-in-law was the Confederate States Army veteran and Austin, Texas-based photographer, William J. Oliphant (1845–1930).
He rehabilitated an old stone house which was located near a topological feature, and called his second home, "Friday Mountain Ranch."
[13] Governor John B. Connally, Jr. issued a proclamation for Webb to be interred at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
[3] In his honor the University of Texas established the Walter Prescott Webb Chair of History and Ideas.
Webb called the settled area of Europe 'the Metropolis' and the rest of the world 'the Great Frontier', claiming that "the Great Plains environment... constitutes a geographic unity whose influences have been so powerful as to put a characteristic mark upon everything that survives within its borders", pointing to the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as essential to its settlement.
[16] The economic domination of the North, through the tariff, Civil War pensions, and patent monopolies, and the development of the centralized economy dominated by 200 major corporations (over the South and West, which contained the largest share of natural resources) was the theme of Divided We Stand (1937).
[citation needed] More Water for Texas (1954) popularized and vitalized a federal study of what he regarded as the most serious problem of his state.
The Webb thesis focused on the fragility of the Western environment, pointing out the aridity of the territory and the dangers of an industrialized West.
[citation needed] In 1951 Webb published The Great Frontier, proposing the Boom Hypothesis, that the new lands discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 ran out by 1900, closing the frontier and giving the U.S. economic and ecological problems, threatening the future of individualism, capitalism, and democracy.
[17] In a 2006 Technology and Culture review of The Great Frontier, George O'Har shows that in Webb's classic interdisciplinary history of the post-Civil War West, he develops dominant characteristics of the Great Plains – treelessness, level terrain, and semiaridity – and examines effect on the lives of people from very different environments.
To succeed, pioneers made radical readjustments in their way of life, eschewed traditions, and altered social institutions.
O'Har notes that Webb believed what set the Great Plains apart from other regions was its individualism, innovation, democracy, and lawlessness, thus putting him into the school of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis.
His focus is said to have missed the emergence of a national empire, and others criticize him for failing to acknowledge the roles played by women, Indians, and Mexicans.
[19] Webb was an esteemed historian when he wrote an article in the May 1957 edition of Harper's entitled "The American West, Perpetual Mirage".
In the article, Webb criticized U.S. water policy in the West, stating that the region was "a semidesert with a desert heart", and that it was a national folly to continue to follow the current federal policy (managed through the United States Bureau of Reclamation) of attempting to convert the region into productive cropland through irrigation.
