Greek War of Independence The second part of Webb’s thesis stressed that the Great Plains represented an institutional chasm He argued that Anglo-American lifestyles and institutions were adapted to wet, well-timbered environments, and Americans had evolved mainly from the wet and timbered regions of northwestern Europe When they immigrated to North America, they settled along the Atlantic seaboard, a region of plentiful rainfall and dense forests They settled the region successfully because their lifestyles, tools, methodologies, and institutions were suited to this physical environment When settlers came to the Great Plains, the culture and customs that they brought with them from the East made it difficult for them to cope with the foreign environment for long periods of time Settlement jumped from the wet forests of the East to the western Pacific slope of California and Oregon, leaving the corridor known as the Great American Desert uninhabited and undeveloped They had to adapt their institutions and lifestyles to the plains On the Great Plains, the horse, the Colt revolver, the Winchester carbine, the open-range cattle industry, barbed wire, sod housing, windmills, dry land farming, and irrigation, as well as new laws, were all part of the process of adaptation See also Jefferson, Thomas; Lewis and Clark Expedition; Manifest Destiny Further reading: Bochert, John R America’s Northern Heartland Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Danbom, David B Born in the Country: A History of Rural America Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; Frazier, Ian Great Plains New York: Picador Press, 2001; Stegner, Wallace Wolf Willow, A History, a Story, and Memory of the Last Plains Frontier New York: Viking Compass Book, 1966; Webb, Walter Prescott The Great Plains Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981 John H Barnhill Greek War of Independence The Ottoman Empire had ruled all of Greece, with the exception of the Ionian Islands, since its conquest of the Byzantine Empire over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries But in the 18th and 19th centuries, as revolutionary nationalism grew across Europe (due, in part, to the influence of the French Revolution) and the power of the Ottoman Empire declined, Greek nationalism began to assert itself and drew support from western European “philhellenes.” 169 By that time, the desire for independence was common among Greeks of all classes, whose Hellenism, or sense of Greek nationality, had long been supported by the Greek Orthodox Church, by the survival of the Greek language, and by the administrative arrangements of the Ottoman Empire In Odessa (a port on the Black Sea now in Ukraine) in 1814, Athanasios Tsakalof, Emmanuel Xanthos, and Nikolaos Skoufas founded a Greek Independence Party, called Philiki Etairia (Friendly Society) The founders recruited merchants and rich expatriates abroad, as well as military leaders, priests, and intellectuals The fall of Napoleon I in 1815 released many military adventurers from whom the Greeks could learn the art of contemporary warfare Vienna, Great Britain, and the United States were havens of refuge and planning for Greek émigrés The obvious candidate to lead the Philiki Etairia was Ioannis Kapodistrias In 1808 he was invited to St Petersburg and in 1815 he was appointed by Czar Alexander i as foreign minister of Russia The message of the society spread quickly and branches opened throughout Greece Members met in secret and came from all spheres of life The leaders held the firm belief that armed force was the only effective means of liberation from the Ottoman Empire and made generous monetary contributions to the freedom fighters With the support of Greek exile communities and covert assistance from Russia, they prepared for a rebellion Only a suitable opportunity of revolt was needed, and this was provided by the rebellion of Ali Pasha against Sultan Mahmud II While the Turks were preoccupied with this threat, the Greeks rose to war The start of the uprising can be set as March 6, 1821, when Alexandros Ypsilanti, the leader of the Etairists, crossed the Prut River into Turkish-held Moldavia with a small force of troops, or on March 23, when rebels took control of Kalamata in the Peloponnese peninsula Regardless, on March 25, 1821, Bishop Germanos raised the Greek flag as the banner of revolt at the monastery of Aghia Lavra in the Peloponnese The ensuing revolution went through three phases: local successes in 1821–25, the crisis caused by the Egyptian intervention on behalf of the Ottoman Empire in 1826–28, and a period of overwhelming European intervention on behalf of the Greeks ending in Turkish recognition of Greek independence in 1832 From the beginning, the revolution had great momentum Simultaneous risings took place across the Peloponnese, central Greece, including Macedonia, and the islands of Crete and Cyprus Fighting broke