Environmental historians have long understood that the meanings they hope to express and the way they tell a story are deeply related; one of the original purposes of the American Society of Environmental History was to create a place for the environment in the stories historians were telling. Just how this might work was explained in an extended reflection (and self-reflection) by William Cronon in an essay in the Journal of American History in 1992, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," that has now become a foundational entry in the early scholarship in environmental history. Looking at four different versions of the settlement of the Great Plains, Cronon explained how they told much different stories because they functioned differently as narrative. All of them are accurate and true, but all of the presented different versions of history and came to much different conclusions about the relationship between humans and environment in a particular place.