Dr. Barbara Handy-Marchello taught Women's History and the American West at the University of North Dakota for fifteen years, retiring in 2006. She earned her M.A. in American History at North Dakota State University and her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa (1996). She was born in Illinois and lived in Colorado and Wyoming before moving to North Dakota in 1980. She is married to Marty Marchello and together they enjoy an outdoor life in the fields, woods, and streams of North Dakota.  Women of the Northern Plains won the Caroline Bancroft Prize for the best book in Western History in 2005 awarded by the Western History Association.

This book is about the lives and contributions of pioneer women from the very beginnings of white settlement to the time of the great depression. As a picture of their lives emerges, readers see clearly how women worked beside their men, carrying half and often more of the work load that supported families and moved the culture and economy of the prairies into the modern era. This is not a family history, though names of pioneering women are scattered throughout. Handy-Marchello made a clear-eyed effort to provide accurate answers to questions, making an effort to discredit or verify the usual answers. She did this by digging into documents kept by government agencies, consulting the huge body of interview reports composed by the Writers Project, and by reading diaries where available.

The book explores such issues as marriage and divorce, abuse, number of births per woman, out of wedlock births, mental illness, health care, education, and status within a social structure that brought its customs and values from elsewhere in the United States or from eastern and northern Europe.

North Dakota’s struggle to achieve judicious government control over corporate interests contributed to a political tradition that is unique in American history. The North Dakota Political Tradition, written in 1981 to help commemorate North Dakota’s centennial, is the first in the North Dakota Centennial Heritage Series. It helps explain the origin of certain radical tendencies and mediating forces at work in North Dakota politics from 1889 through the 1950s. The authors define the political heritage of North Dakota as a successful blend of creative political leadership with the constructive activism of a concerned citizenry. This is the story of the genesis of movements within and without the Republican Party that led to the rise to power of such colorful and dynamic leaders as Alexander McKenzie, “Honest John” Burke, William Langer, Fred Aandahl, and Elizabeth Preston Anderson. The North Dakota Political Tradition fulfills the need for a concise political history of the state. This book is the only volume of its kind available: a collection of essays delineating the personalities and movements that shaped not only North Dakota’s future, but the future of the nation as well.

Charles N. Glaab, professor of history, University of Toledo
Bill G. Reid, professor of history, North Dakota State University
Larry Remele, historian, State Historical Society of North Dakota
Daniel F. Rylance, curator, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota
Glenn H. Smith, professor of history, University of North Dakota
D. Jerome Tweton, professor of history, University of North Dakota
Robert P. Wilkins, professor of history, University of North Dakota

Editor
Thomas W. Howard, professor of history, University of North Dakota

Born in Dickinson, North Dakota, Clay Jenkinson is a cultural commentator who has devoted most of his professional career to public humanities programs.  He received the Charles Frankel Prize in 1989, the National Endowment for the Humanities highest award (now called the National Humanities Medal).  Well-known for his portrayal of President Thomas Jefferson, Jenkinson was invited to present the third president to President and Mrs. Clinton at a White House-sponsored event in 1994, and was a major commentator for the public television program, Thomas Jefferson, by award-winning humanities documentary producer Ken Burns.  Since his first work with the North Dakota Humanities Council in the late 1970s, Clay Jenkinson has made thousands of presentations throughout the United States and its territories, portraying Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, Robert Oppenheimer, and, most recently, Theodore Roosevelt.  He continues to host The Thomas Jefferson Hour heard nationally on public radio.

Jenkinson has served as a scholar-in-residence at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, and at Dickinson State University, Dickinson, North Dakota; artistic director, Great Basin Chautauqua; director, New Enlightenment Radio Network; and is currently director of the Dakota Institute, affiliated with the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, North Dakota.  A graduate of the University of Minnesota, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.  He has written several books and now lives in Bismarck.  He recently published A Free and Hardy Life, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt (Dakota Institute, 2011).

Experience the Lewis and Clark Expedition by reading, together in one place, entries from the journals of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse. A Vast and Open Plain features all the journal entries written by the Corps of Discovery for each of the 218 days that the explorers spent in what is now North Dakota. The 648-page book is beautifully enhanced by nearly 100 color and black-and-white images, as well as original maps.  Clay S. Jenkinson edited and provided annotations for A Vast and Open Plain, and also provided an introduction and supplementary material.   The book features a foreword by James P. Ronda, the preeminent Lewis and Clark scholar in the country who holds the H.G. Barnard Chair of History at the University of Tulsa.

Dr. H. Elaine Lindgren, professor of sociology, was a member of the North Dakota State University faculty from 1970 until her retirement in 2005. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.  Her research interests include social change, gender and citizen participation.  Recently, she completed an e-book entitled “Work Makes Life Sweet, Or Does It?” This is a pictorial documentary of work in North Dakota. 

Lindgren's article "Coal, Cuba, and Courage: The Adventuresome Spirit of Annie C. Lind, " published in North Dakota History, Vol. 67, No. 2, 2000, received the North Dakota History's 2001 Editor's Award.

Land is often known by the names of past owners. "Emma’s Land," "Gina’s quarter," and "the Ingeborg Land" are reminders of the many women who homesteaded across North Dakota in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Land in Her Own Name records these homesteaders’ experiences as revealed in interviews with surviving homesteaders and their families and friends, land records, letters, and diaries.

These women’s fascinating accounts tell of locating a claim, erecting a shelter, and living on the prairie. Their ethnic backgrounds include Yankee, Scandinavian, German, and German-Russian, as well as African-American, Jewish, and Lebanese. Some were barely twenty-one, while others had reached their sixties. A few lived on their land for life and "never borrowed a cent against it"; others sold or rented the land to start a small business or two provide money for education.

Robert L. Morlan (1920-1985) was a distinguished political scientist, educator, administrator and author.  He taught at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis from 1948 to 1949.  Later Morlan became a professor of political science at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California, where he taught from 1956 until his death.  Among his books are Intergovernmental  Relations in Education; Capitol, Courthouse and City Hall, Political Prairie Fire; and American Government.

Political Prairie Fire provided the first in-depth history of the Nonpartisan League, including its inception, growth, progressive platform, political victories and death.  A review in Ohio History noted,

Political Prairie Fire still remains the best comprehensive history of the early years of the NPL with its political strength centered in North Dakota and Minnesota. Morlan's work with the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor party in the late 1940s sparked his interest in the NPL's history and led to this narrative account that established the framework for researching and writing the history of the NPL. Morlan emphasized the League's origins; its innovative use of the direct primary; its legislative program to aid family farmers; its condemnation as "socialist," "prussianized," and "bolshevik" in the wartime mobilization and postwar Red Scare of 1917-1920; and its rapid decline after 1920. By 1915 farmers in western North Dakota faced severe economic hardships including marketing malpractices in the inspection, weighing, and grading of grain; exorbitant elevator storage charges and discriminatory railroad rate practices; and domination by bankers in St. Paul and Minneapolis through high interest rates and increased farm foreclosures. Under the charismatic leadership of Arthur C. Townley and his Socialist veterans corps of organizers using modern sales techniques, Ford automobiles, and members' dues payment by postdated checks, farmers employed the direct primary to win control of the Republican Party in hopes of bringing about "the New Day in North Dakota." Following the capture of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature in the 1918 elections, the NPL enacted the New Day in the 1919 legislative session. The NPL created state-sponsored and state-financed agencies such as the Industrial Commission, the Bank of North Dakota, the Mill and Elevator Association, and the Home Building Association. Morlan's account delivers massive narrative detail of these developments almost to the point of inundation. He leaves summary, analysis, and discussion of the NPL's legacy to the last in claiming that the NPL was "the last of the great farmers' crusades" which "laid much of the foundation of modern midwestern liberalism," so that the "radicalism of 1916 is in large measure the accepted practice of today" (pp. 359-361).

Jamie Parsley has been an associate poet laureate of North Dakota since 2004.  Born in Fargo and raised near Harwood, ND, the first of his ten books of poems, Paper Doves, Falling and Other Poems, was published in 1992. Over the next 17 years, he published eight more books of poems including The Loneliness of Blizzards (1995), a book-length poem, Cloud: A Poem in 2 Acts (1997), The Wounded Table (1999), earth into earth, water into water (2000), no stars, no moon (2004), Ikon (2005), Just Once (2007) and This Grass (2009), a book of poems accompanied by paintings by artist Gin Templeton. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College and a master's degree from Nashotah House Seminary. An Episcopal priest, he serves as Priest in Charge of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in North Fargo and as executive assistant to the bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of North Dakota. He also teaches at the University of Mary's Fargo campus. He lives in Fargo. 

For more information please check
Jamie's website: http://jamieparsley.com
or his blog: http://jamieparsley.blogspot.com
or The Institute for Regional Studies: http://ndsu.edu/ahss/ndirs/

In the early evening of Thursday, June 20, 1957, a tornado struck the city of Fargo, North Dakota.  When it was done, ten people lay dead (three more people would later die from their injuries), a city was devastated and countless lives would never be the same again.

Among the dead were two relatives of Jamie Parsley, a poet and an Episcopal priest, who was born almost thirteen years after the storm. In this evocative and moving elegy of the storm and its victims, Parsley weaves a heartbreaking story of loss, poetry, pain, faith and ultimately renewal, and gives voice to those victims who, before now, were unable to speak for themselves. Fargo, 1957 is the story of the resilience and fortitude of the people who survived of the storm and those who did not.

James P. Ronda holds the H.G. Barnard Chair in Western American History at the University of Tulsa and is the past president of the Western History Association. A specialist in the history of the exploration of the American West, he is the author of many books, essays, and presentations at scholarly conferences. Professor Ronda’s books include: Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (1984); Astoria and Empire (1990); Revealing America: Image and Imagination in the Exploration of North America (1996); From Conquest to Conservation: Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West (1997); Voyages of Discovery: Essays on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1998); Jefferson’s West: A Journey with Lewis and Clark (2000); and Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark  (2001).  In addition to an active research and writing career, Professor Ronda has been a consultant for many museum projects including the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Great Falls, Montana; the Washington State Historical Society’s "The Army Explores the West" exhibition; the Library of Congress Lewis and Clark Exploration exhibition; and as a member of the board of advisors, for the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition. Professor Ronda has been a consultant and on-camera commentator for a number of television documentaries including those made by PBS, Disney-Discovery; Arts and Entertainment Channel, C-SPAN, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the Oklahoma Public Broadcasting Service. Professor Ronda has recently been named to the Advisory Committee of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.  

Ronda's book takes thinking about the Lewis and Clark expedition to another very important level: that of considering the voyage from a Native American point of view. Using the journals and drawing upon research and his extensive knowledge, Ronda makes the reader consider the significance of major encounters in terms of what could have been mutually understood, and what was probably misunderstood.

Soon after the expedition left Camp Dubois to ascend the Missouri, it met tribal people. Tribe after tribe lived along the way that they took up the river, so the captains had ample chance to relay their message to those people. That meant informing them of the change in government since the Louisiana Purchase, giving gifts, admonishing them not to fight traditional enemies, and demonstrating technologically superior power. Usually, this performance was followed by music and dancing, offered by both parties.

The experiences with native peoples varied from tribe to tribe, but generally the natives up the Missouri River and on the Pacific Ocean had experience with Europeans, whereas the Plateau people in what is now Idaho and eastern Oregon did not. Moreover, the friendly encounters with Arikara, Mandan, Shoshoni, Nez Perce, Walla Walla and others contrast sharply with those of the Teton Sioux and the Piegan Blackfeet. Yet with each tribe, Ronda informs readers about the possible gaps in giving and receiving messages and about the differences in goals and in understandings.