Plains Humanities Alliance: Great Books of the Great Plains

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Your search returned 83 entries:

Ambrose, Stephen E.
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Published: New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996
A good, readable history of the Lewis & Clark expedition, in the context of a biography of Lewis.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Native American, Nature & Environment, Travel

Arends, Shirley Fischer
The Central Dakota Germans: Their History, Language and Culture
Published: Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1989
Language is the tool used here to trace the history of the migration and cultural development of Central Dakota Germans—to be exact, Germans from Russia. The Germans from Russia were a group who lived in isolation in Russia until their privileges were invaded in the late 1800s by the Czar. This caused a migration to the United States. Once here, they again developed isolated communities. Shirley Arends focuses on those living in Central Dakota. The book contains invaluable facts, details, and research about German-Russian folklore, culture and language, though the narrative is scholarly.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, European American, Folklife - Language, Rural Life

Arvold, Alfred G.
The Little Country Theater
Published: Published: New York, The Macmillan Company, 1923
Alfred Arvold believed that the loss of population in rural areas was draining those communities of their ability to collectively express their creative spirit. He felt that this absence of cultural life in both small towns and the countryside stemmed from prejudice against those who "till the land" (25) and from "the absence of any force which seeks to arouse the creative instincts and to stimulate the imagination and initiative" (27). Arvold believed that "force" was theater. So he dusted off an unused room in the North Dakota Agricultural College and started a project named "The Little Country Theatre." Francis Rufus Bellamy, a decade after the book was written, described Arvold’s scheme in a 1935 North American Review article: "at this moment he has a circulating library of thousands of plays, pageants and rodeos, with photographs of the costumes and settings and everything that an amateur producer needs to know. His college lends them freely to individuals, community clubs and teachers." Arvold's book contains revealing morsels of the life of the agrarian middle class. He describes how people preserved fables of their homeland by creating plays that passed their messages to the next generation. An entire script, titled A Bee in Drone's Hivez, is preserved, along with descriptions and pictures of extravagant amateur productions, including one with a chorus of two hundred girls dressed in white robes. He also discusses a tour of forty towns designed to promote these plays and his library as a means to help rural communities survive.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Art, Folklife - Community Life

Barbour, Barton H.
Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade
Published: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001
Provocative history of Fort Union, citadel of the American Fur Company on the upper Missouri, emphasizing the meeting of cultures that took place there.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Military, Native American

Benson, Bjorn, Elizabeth Hampsten, and Kathryn Sweney, Eds.
Day In, Day Out: Women's Lives in North Dakota
Published: Grand Forks: University of North Dakota, 1988
Pioneering anthology of women's writing in the state.

Genre: Nonfiction -Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Gender

Blackorby, Edward C.
Prairie Rebel: The Public Life of William Lemke
Published: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963
First of two fine political biographies by Blackorby. The second is Prairie Populist: The Life and Times of Usher L. Burdick (Fargo: Institute for Regional Studies, 2001). A masterly and award-winning biography, treating a fascinating although somewhat marginal political figure. Of interest also because Burdick himself was an avid amateur historical writer.

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: History, Politics

Blasingame, Ike
Dakota Cowboy: My Life in the Old Days
Published: New York: Putnam, 1958; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985
First hand history of the cattle trade before towns and homesteaders filled up the range west of the Missouri.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Rural Life

Bliss, Paul Southworth
Spin Dance and Spring Comes to Shaw's Garden
Published: Chicago: Lakeside, 1934
Uncommonly precise descriptive poems set on the North Dakota landscape.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Poetry
Subject: Nature & Environment

Bojer, Johan
The Emigrants
Published: New York: Century, 1925; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978
Follows the experiences of Norwegian settlers in the Red River Valley.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History, European American

Borden, William
Superstoe
Published: New York: Harper & Row, 1968; Athens: Orloff Press, 1996
A sometimes comic, sometimes not, look at home-grown biological warfare.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: Society

Burdick, Usher L.
Tales from Buffalo Land: The Story of Old Fort Buford
Published: Baltimore: Wirth Brothers, 1940
See the entry under Edward Blackorby for a biography of Usher Burdick. Burdick's historical interests were an important aspect of his persona.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Military

Burgum, Jassamine Slaughter
Zezula: Pioneer Days in the Smoky Water Country
Published: Valley City: Getchell & Nielsen, 1937
Remembrances, family diaries, and a clear eye for detail make this fascinating local history.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History

Case, Harold and Eva, Compilers
100 Years at Fort Berthold: The History of Fort Berthold Indian Mission, 1876-1976
Published: Bismarck: Bismarck Tribune, 1977
A history of interactions between Episcopalian missionaries and Native Americans.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Native American

Corcoran, James
Bitter Harvest: Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus: Murder in the Heartland
Published: New York: Viking, 1990; New York: Penguin, 1991. With new foreword, and new subtitle, The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland, New York: Penguin, 1995
An account of the rise of the Posse Comitatus (a right-wing protest group), culminating in 1983 with the shooting of federal marshals in North Dakota and the manhunt for Gordon Kahl. Written by a journalist who covered the Kahl case.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History

Crawford, Lewis F.
Rekindling Camp Fires: The Exploits of Ben Arnold (Connor)
Published: Bismarck: Capital, 1926
Praised by J. Frank Dobie for "richness," this biography chronicles a frontier scout, soldier, and jack-of-all-trades ranch-hand.

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: History, Military, Rural Life

Crawford, Lewis F.
History of North Dakota
Published: 3 vols., Chicago: American Historical Society, 1931
Massive, comprehensive subscription history with biographies.

Genre: Nonfiction - Reference
Subject: History

Critchfield, Richard
Those Days: An American Album
Published: Garden City: Doubleday, 1986
Compelling family memoirs of growing up in Cass County and Fargo. A later Critchfield work in which North Dakota figures prominently as a rural society in decline is Trees, Why Do You Wait? America's Changing Rural Culture (Washington: Island Press, 1991).

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Society

Dahl, Borghild
Karen
Published: New York: Random House, 1947
Novel describing the tenaciousness of a young woman in a Norwegian-American settlement.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History, European American

Danbom, David
Our Purpose Is to Serve: The First Century of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1990
Unusually sound station history that not only chronicles major developments but puts them into the context of the professionalization of the agricultural sciences.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History

Densmore, Francis
Teton Sioux Music
Published: Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 61, 1918; New York, Da Capo Press, 1972; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992
A pioneering ethnomusicologist, Densmore recorded and transcribed Dakota music and poetry at the turn of century.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: Native American, Folklife - Music, Folklife - Language

Drache, Hiram M.
The Day of the Bonanza: A History of Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley of the North
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1964
A history of the wheat boom of the 1870s-1880s. First of several works by Drache treating large-scale agriculture. In Drache's extensive bibliography of publications, another work of particular note is The Challenge of the Prairie (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1970), which treats the family farmers who succeeded the bonanza farmers in the Red River Valley.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History

Dresden, Donald
The Marquis de Mores: Emperor of the Bad Lands
Published: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970
A masterful study of the French aristocrat who brought high culture to the meat-packing industry in Medora.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Culture

Duebbert, Harold F., Ed.
Wildfowling in Dakota, 1873-1903: Old-Time Duck and Goose Shooting on the Dakota Prairies
Published: Bismarck: Windfeather, 2003
Collected narratives of waterfowling on the northern plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Genre: Nonfiction - Creative Nonfiction/Essays
Subject: History, Sports & Leisure

Eastman, Charles A.
Indian Boyhood
Published: New York: McClure, Philips, 1902; New York: Dover Publications, 1971; Ann Arbor: Gryphon Books, 1971; Alexandria: Time-Life, 1993
Orally transmitted legends and histories by a pioneering Native American writer.

Genre: Nonfiction - Oral History
Subject: History, Native American, Culture

Enger, Leif
Peace Like a River
Published: New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001
Although the novel begins in Minnesota, it unfolds across North Dakota, and the author is spot on in his sense of place. Mix in a little magical realism, move the action deep into the North Dakota badlands, and you have a great read.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: Society

Erdrich, Louise
Love Medicine
Published: New York : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984; New York: Bantam, 1985. New and Expanded Version, New York: H. Holt, 1993
Erdrich is a first-rate author with international status. Her first novel introduces family and settings developed through a dozen following books. North Dakota characters, cultures, and settings figure in five subsequent novels by Erdrich, including The Beet Queen (New York: Holt, 1986; New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998) and, most recently, The Master Butcher's Singing Club (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003).

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: Native American

Flint, Roland
Resuming Green: Selected Poems, 1965-1982
Published: New York: Dial Press, 1983
Born and raised in Park River, North Dakota, Flint has been praised as "a secular poet who was able to find an evidence of God's grace everywhere."

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Poetry
Subject:

Gilmore, Melvin R.
Prairie Smoke
Published: Bismarck: Bismarck Tribune, 1921; 2nd Ed., Rev., with subtitle, A Collection of Lore of the Prairies, 1922; New York: Columbia University Press, 1929; New York, AMS, 1966. With a new introduction by Roger L. Welsch, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987.
Tells the traditional stories and describes the lifeways of some of the first people of the Plains- the Pawnee, Sioux, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, and Omaha - and conveys the essential ties Native peoples have to the land.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: Native American, Folklife - Oral Traditions/Humor

Goodbird, Edward, as told to Gilbert L. Wilson
Goodbird the Indian: His Story
Published: New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914. Introduction by Mary Jane Schneider, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1985
A memoir for young readers that offers a look at the Hidatsa people's early reservation years. In a simple, engaging style, Goodbird describes growing up and learning about traditional skills, religious beliefs, and history during a time of great change.

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: Native American, Culture, History, Religion & Spirituality

Hagedorn, Hermann
Roosevelt in the Bad Lands
Published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921
This illustrated account of Theodore Roosevelt's life as a rancher is drawn from books, letters, documents, and old newspapers, but mostly from those who knew him. The author deliberately parted from a factual telling only to change names where survivors or their children might be offended.

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: History

Hampsten, Elizabeth
Settlers' Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains
Published: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991
A history of children's experiences in the settlement generation of North Dakota. Hampsten, in a rather bleak depiction of children's lives, poses a distinctly different interpretation from that of such scholars as Elliot West.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History

Hargreaves, Mary Wilma M.
Dry Farming in the Northern Plains, 1900-1925
Published: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957
The standard and authoritative work on dry farming in the region.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Nature & Environment

Horne, Esther Burnett, and Sally McBeth
Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher
Published: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998
According to family tradition, Horne was a descendent of Sakajawea. She dedicated her career to teaching and mentoring Native American children.

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: History, Native American

Hudson, Lois
The Bones of Plenty
Published: Boston: Little, Brown, 1962; St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984
An excellent novel about a North Dakota farm family set in the Dust Bowl years. Hudson's Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964; St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984), a collection of short stories, covers some of the same ground.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History

Isern, Thomas D.
Dakota Circle: Excursions on the True Plains
Published: Fargo: Institute for Regional Studies, 2000
Essays in the history, folklife, and culture of the northern plains, drawing on the author's newspaper column, Plains Folk.

Genre: Nonfiction - Creative Nonfiction/Essays
Subject: Folklife - Community Life, Culture, History

Jackson, Phil, and Hugh Delehanty
Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior
Published: New York: Hyperion, 1995
One of the most successful coaches in NBA history, Phil Jackson, head coach for the Chicago Bulls, provides an inside look at the higher wisdom of teamwork. This work describes his philosophy of mindful basketball and his life-long quest to bring enlightenment to the competitive world of professional sports.

Genre: Nonfiction - Creative Nonfiction/Essays
Subject: Sports & Leisure, Religion & Spirituality

Jenkinson, Clay S.
A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota, 1804-1806
Published: Bismarck: State Historical Society of North Dakota, 2003
An earlier and notable attempt to package the Corps of Discovery for North Dakota was Russell Reid, Ed., Lewis and Clark in North Dakota (Bismarck: State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1988), which was reprinted from North Dakota History.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Native American, Nature & Environment, Travel

Kelsey, Vera
Red River Runs North!
Published: New York: Harper, 1951
The influence of the Red River on history, transportation, settlement, and consciousness in eastern North Dakota.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Culture, Nature & Environment

Kraenzel, Carl Frederick
The Great Plains in Transition
Published: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955
By a sociologist from Hebron, North Dakota, the greatest of the refiners of Webb's thesis. Suggests that adaptation to the plains is not confined to settlement times, but needs to continue in contemporary times. Sketches a model of community organization on the plains. Identifies mobility, flexibility, and reserves as keys to survival on the plains.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: Society, Cultural/Human Geography

Lamar, Howard Roberts
Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics
Published: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. With new foreword by Jack Dalrymple and new introduction by Catherine MacNicol Stock, Fargo: Institute for Regional Studies, 1996
Sound political history of the formation of Dakota Territory, the working of the territorial system, the division and statehood movements, and the rise of agrarian insurgency.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Politics

Lang, Lincoln A.
Ranching with Roosevelt
Published: Published: Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1926
Ranching with Roosevelt is a first-hand account of one of the first ranching families to settle in North Dakota, framed as a biography of a young Theodore Roosevelt. In an early example of environmental history, Lincoln Lang says of his approach: "The way in which I have written this history of the Bad Lands, of the heart of the great Sioux country, of wild Nature herself ... [is that] ... The white man made it bad in truth; all but stilled its pulsations forever, in his futile, ill-advised efforts to tame it" (350). Lang is a staunch conservationist who patiently explains how Roosevelt's relationship with the land was formed by witnessing various forms of state management of natural resources. He exposes how the government contracted hunters to slaughter buffalo herds. The result was a "blood-lustful debauch of two days, masquerading as a hunt in the name of necessity, in course of which over five thousand of the magnificent animals (buffalo)" (24) were slaughtered by six hundred mounted Sioux Indians. Lang calls this a government-sponsored conspiracy to let the Indians destroy their own substance, thereby dooming themselves to reservations. In a chapter titled "Misapplied Energy," Lang discusses the tragedy of "unintelligent grazing" (335) caused by government land grants that were only workable every seven years. Lang concludes with the fall of Sitting Bull, an explanation of the "Ghost Dance" in the context of Sioux starvation, the last of his encounters with President Roosevelt, and a sad declaration of how the already evident poverty in the Dakotas could have been avoided had the Federal Government sought to better understand this land.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Military, Native American, Rural Life

Lass, William E.
A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri River
Published: Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1962
This study "traces the development of commercial navigation on the Upper Missouri" from 1819 to 1936 (vii), arguing that steamboats built the Dakotas and Montana. Before 1859, the area was populated by "vanguards of the last frontier—the traders, explorers and military men" (vii). With the opening of the Dakotas to settlement, the gold rush in Montana, and the expansive military campaigns against the Sioux Uprising in western Minnesota, Lass describes how white expansionists navigated and settled this last frontier by boat as much as by wagon or train. This well-documented work is a must-read for any scholar of the American West.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Military, Native American, Transportation

Lee, Peggy
Miss Peggy Lee: An Autobiography
Published: New York: D. Fine, 1989
Among America's finest jazz musicians, Peggy Lee recounts her childhood in Jamestown and her first professional work as a singer in Fargo in this touching autobiography.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History

Libby, Orrin Grant, Ed.
The Arikara Narrative of the Campaign Against the Hostile Dakotas, June, 1876
Published: Bismarck: State Historical Society of North Dakota, North Dakota Historical Collections, Vol. 6, 1920; Glorieta, NM: Rio Grande Press, 1976. Preface by Dee Brown, introduction by D'Arcy McNickle, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998
These invaluable accounts narrate the experience of Arikara scouts who accompanied Custer's 7th Cavalry to the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Native American

Lindgren, Elaine
Land in Her Own Name: Women as Homesteaders in North Dakota
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1991; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996
Pioneering compilation of the experiences of female homesteaders.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Gender

Lounsberry, Clement Augustus
North Dakota History and People: Outlines of American History
Published: Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1917
Subscription history with biographies.

Genre: Nonfiction - Reference
Subject: History

Low, Ann Marie
Dust Bowl Diary
Published: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984
Primary account of North Dakota in the 1930s.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Rural Life
Purchase online from publisher.

Lowman, Bill
Riders of the Leafy Spurge
Published: Sentinel Butte: The Author, 1995
Great cowboy poetry-"Let 'er buck!"

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Poetry
Subject: Culture

Lyons, Richard, and Prudence Gearey Sand
Stackers of Wheat
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1951
Lyons and Sand wrote poetry epitomizing technical excellence and lyrical beauty, Lyons was a prolific writer who published dozens of books; Sand was a leading proponent of modernism in American verse. Stackers of Wheat is among the first books to be published by the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Poetry
Subject: Rural Life

McGrath, Thomas
Letter to an Imaginary Friend
Published: Denver: A. Swallow, 1962-; Parts I & II, Chicago: Swallow, 1970; Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1985, 1997
McGrath's sprawling semi-autobiographical epic is among America's greatest long poems. Detailing his own history as representative of a national struggle toward consciousness, McGrath is justly famous for his line, "Dakota is everywhere." Also of particular note in the McGrath corpus is The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems (Chicago: Swallow, 1973). Poems of war, class struggle, social protest, and love by North Dakota's finest poet.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Poetry
Subject: History

Morlan, Robert Loren
Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915-1922
Published: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974. With new introduction by Larry Remele, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1985
The gold standard on the NPL-no work has superceded it, and the story of the NPL is centrally mythic to North Dakota.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: Politics

Murphy, Timothy
Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir
Published: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2000
Murphy's poetry is infused with Classical meters and first hand farming experience.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Poetry
Subject: Rural Life

Nelson, Bruce
Land of the Dacotahs
Published: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1946
A broad, popular history of the northern plains that leads to a plea for Missouri River development. Nelson seemed on his way to becoming a major regional voice in the generation of Joseph Kinsey Howard and J. Frank Dobie, but died young of tuberculosis.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History

Norris, Kathleen
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Published: New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001
Although the author is from Lemmon, South Dakota (the northern city limit of which is the North Dakota line), much of the experience described takes place in North Dakota locales, especially Assumption Abbey of Richardton.

Genre: Nonfiction - Creative Nonfiction/Essays
Subject: Religion & Spirituality

Plotkin, Kathy L.
The Pearson Girls: A Family Memoir of the Dakota Plains
Published: Fargo: Institute for Regional Studies, 1998
A vivid memoir that chronicles a large farm family, embraces the sensuality of the region, and raises the theme of farm abandonment by the children of immigrants.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Rural Life

Potter, Tracy
Sheheke: Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark
Published: Helena: Farcountry Press and Washburn: Fort Mandan Press, 2003
Sound biography of Sheheke, civil chief of the Mandan village Mitutanka, who befriended Lewis and Clark. Nicely triangulated from fragmented sources.

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: Native American

Power, Susan
The Grass Dancer
Published: New York: Putnam's, 1994; New York: Berkley Books, 1995
A controversial novel in which a Native American woman dances in a traditionally male ceremony.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: Native American

Raaen, Aagot
Grass of the Earth: Immigrant Life in the Dakota Country
Published: Northfield: Norwegian American Historical Association, 1950; New York : Arno Press, 1979. With a new introduction by Barbara Handy-Marchello, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1994
The story of a (somewhat dysfunctional) Norwegian immigrant family, a daughter of which (Aagot) raised herself up through education.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History, European American

Rikoon, J. Sanford, Editor
Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains
Published: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995
Challenging (not to say miserable) conditions faced by a Jewish bride on a homestead in north-central North Dakota in the 1890s.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, European American

Robinson, Elwyn B.
History of North Dakota
Published: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. With new introduction by Jerome Tweton and concluding material by David B. Danbom, Fargo: Institute for Regional Studies, 1995
This is the standard history of North Dakota, well-known for its six-point interpretation of state history.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History

Rolfsrud, Erling N.
Gopher Tales for Papa
Published: Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1949; Farwell, MN: Lantern Books, 1984
Many North Dakotans remember this children's book as their introduction to characters and settings firmly rooted in the state. Another substantial contribution among Rolfsrud's many titles is Lanterns Over the Prairies (2 vols., Brainerd: Lakeland Color Press, 1949-50). Colorful sketches of North Dakota pioneers, many of them eccentrics.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Children's Literature
Subject: History

Roosevelt, Theodore
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
Published: New York: Century, 1888; Philadelphia: Gebbie, 1903; New York, Winchester Press, 1969; New York: Arno, 1970; Alexandria: Time-Life, 1981; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983; New York: St. Martin's, 1985; Birmingham: Palladium, 1999; Fairfield: James Stevenson, 2000
TR's memoir of ranching and hunting on the plains.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Rural Life

Schneider, Mary Jane
North Dakota Indians: An Introduction
Published: Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1986
Controversial and compelling history of North Dakota's first people.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Native American

Severeid, Eric
Not So Wild a Dream
Published: New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946. New introduction by the author, New York: Atheneum, 1976
Growing up in a "sea of wheat" in Velva , North Dakota, experiencing World War II firsthand as a news correspondent, Severeid's autobiography is an excellent behind-the-scene account of American experience.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History

Sherman, William C., and Playford V. Thorson, Eds.
Plains Folk: North Dakota's Ethnic History
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1986
Splendid reference on ethnic settlement, with a chapter devoted to each major ethnic group in the state.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, European American

Shoptaugh, Terry
Roots of Success: History of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1997
An oral history of sugarbeet culture in the Red River Valley.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Rural Life

Stevens, O.A.
Handbook of North Dakota Plants
Published: Fargo: North Dakota Agricultural College, 1950; Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1963
Stevens was the state of knowledge at time of publication; now dated, the work stands as a landmark in the history of botany on the northern plains.

Genre: Nonfiction - Reference
Subject: Nature & Environment

Stock, Catherine McNicol
Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains
Published: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992
Interprets the response of northern plains people to the Great Depression in terms of their producerist culture-hence their ambivalence toward the New Deal.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Society

Sypher, Lucy Johnson
The Spell of Northern Lights
Published: New York: Atheneum, 1975
Set in Wales, North Dakota, Sypher's novels (also including The Edge of Nowhere, Cousins and Circuses, The Turnabout Year) are based on vivid memories and observations of rural life in the early twentieth century.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History, Rural Life

Taylor, Joseph Henry
Sketches of Frontier and Indian Life on the Upper Missouri and Great Plains
Published: Pottstown, PA: The Author, 1889; 2nd Ed., Washburn, ND: The Author, 1895; 3rd Ed., Bismarck: The Author, 1897. Reprint as Frontier and Indian Life and Kaleidoscopic Lives, Washburn: Fiftieth Anniversary Committee, 1932
A second work by Taylor was Kaleidoscopic Lives: A Companion Book to Frontier and Indian Life (Washburn: The Author, 1901; 2nd Ed., 1902; reprint as Frontier and Indian Life and Kaleidoscopic Lives).

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Native American, European American

Thompson, Era Bell
American Daughter
Published: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946; Chicago: Follett, 1967; St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986
This work recounts Bell's background on a North Dakota farm and its influence on her career as a writer and editor.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History

Trupin, Sophie
Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader
Published: Berkeley: Alternative Press, 1984; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988
This memoir describes the life of a young Jewish girl who transplants from Russia to North Dakota with her family at the turn of the century.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, European American

Vossler, Ron
Horse, I Am Your Mother
Published: Fargo: Simon Johnson Guild, 1988
Short stories (some caussssstic) detailing North Dakota German-Russian life.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Short Stories
Subject: History, European American

Waheenee, as told to Gilbert L. Wilson
Waheenee: An Indian Girl's Story Told by Herself
Published: St. Paul: Webb, 1921. Introduction by Jeffrey R. Hanson, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981
See also the fine companion volume by Waheenee (as told to Wilson), Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Studies in Social Science, No. 9, 1917; new title, Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians, and introduction by Jeffery R. Hanson, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987).

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: Native American
Purchase online from publisher.

Watson, Larry
Montana 1948
Published: Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1993
Born in Rugby, North Dakota, Watkins's award winning novel explores the dilemma of choosing between justice and loyalty to one's family.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History

Welk, Lawrence, with Bernice McGeehan
Wunnerful, Wunnerful! The Autobiography of Lawrence Welk
Published: Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971
Includes Welk's boyhood in the German-Russian district of Strasburg, North Dakota, and his exploits as a regional bandsman.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, Culture

Wilkins, Robert P, and Wynona Huchette Wilkins
North Dakota: A Bicentennial History
Published: New York: W.W. Norton, 1977
The short photographer's essay by David Plowden, titled North Dakota, on its own makes this state history worth looking at. As the photo essay suggests, the authors do not provide a traditional commemorative history that lists names, dates, and statistics in chronological order: "The reader seeking these facts can find them elsewhere. Rather we have attempted to convey some sense of the feel of the land and of the people who have devoted a century to it and to interpret the unique political experiments undertaken here" (xi). The authors accomplish this and the book is so well documented that even scholars are bound to discover useful and important anecdotes.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Photography

Willard, Daniel E.
The Story of the Prairies, or, The Landscape Geology of North Dakota
Published: Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1902; 5th Ed., 1907; 10th Ed., revised, St. Paul: Webb, 1923
Truly a pioneering work in advancing popular understanding of physical geography in the region. Lucidly written, and evocative of the author's passion for the land.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: Nature & Environment

Winge, Jane, Ed.
Ritzy Rhubarb Secrets Cookbook
Published: Litchville: Litchville Committee 2000, 1991; 2nd Ed., 1992
"Dedicated to all Rhubarb Enthusiasts," this is the ultimate comfort food book from the northern plains, a cult classic.

Genre: Nonfiction - Reference
Subject: Folklife - Cuisine

Woiwode, Larry
What I'm Going to Do, I Think
Published: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969
What I'm Going to Do is the initial work in a series of novels pursuing North Dakota characters and circumstances that includes, most notably, Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975; New York: Penguin, 1989; St. Paul: Graywolf, 1997). Of Woiwode's nonfiction a particularly notable work is What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Autobiographical work that partakes of the time and place-the hard winter of 1997 in West River North Dakota-to make a work so soul-searching that it wants re-reading after a lapse of years.

Genre: Fiction and Literature - Novel
Subject: History

Woodward, Mary Dodge
The Checkered Years, ed. by Mary Boynton Cowdrey
Published: Caldwell: Caxton, 1937; Fargo: Cass County Historical Society, 1976. With subtitle, A Bonanza Farm Diary, 1885-88, and with a new introduction by Elizabeth Jameson, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989
Excellent diary by a Cass County pioneer who witnessed farm laborers migrating in search of work, survived -40 degree winters while tending geraniums in her shanty window, and read poetry to keep in touch with the world she left back east.

Genre: Nonfiction - Diary/Memoir/Autobiography
Subject: History, European American

Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers' Project
North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State
Published: Fargo: Knight Printing, 1938; New York: Oxford University Press, 1950. With new title, The WPA Guide to 1930s North Dakota, and new introduction by Gerald C. Newborg and Marcia Britton Wolter, Bismarck: State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1990
The North Dakota volume in the WPA's American Guide Series, this work is one of continuing fascination for its homely detail about communities, folklore, and highways in the Flicktertail State. Although far down on the list, it could easily be considered among the very best books written about the state.

Genre: Nonfiction - Monograph
Subject: History, Folklife - Community Life, Folklife - Oral Traditions/Humor

Young, Carrie
Nothing to Do but Stay: My Pioneer Mother
Published: Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991
Two succeeding works from University of Iowa Press renew the author's roots in Williams County, North Dakota. These are The Wedding Dress: Stories from the Dakota Plains (1992) and Prairie Cooks: Glorified Rice, Three-day Buns, and Other Reminiscences (1993).

Genre: Nonfiction - Biography
Subject: History, Gender