Pacing Dakota is a collection of essays reflecting on the history and culture of the Great Plains of North America. The author, with more than forty years as a working historian and regional author, transitions from the close confines of historical archives into the prairie landscapes of the northern plains. Pacing Dakota speaks with the mingled voices of scholarly historian, outdoor sportsman, culinary enthusiast, lifelong Lutheran, and prairie farmboy. The author prowls prairie churches, finds forgotten artifacts, and gathers cherished stories from Williston to Wahpeton and points beyond. He situates his encounters along the way into the canon of literary and historical writing on the prairies. In the end, he speaks for a generation committed to making a good life in this place. Awards 2019 Independent Publishers Book Award Gold Medal Winner in Midwest - Best Regional Nonfiction. 2019 Independent Press Award Winner in Western Nonfiction. What people are saying about Pacing Dakota ... With these colorful and insightful stories from the northern plains, Thomas D. Isern proves again he deserves consideration with Wallace Stegner, Kathleen Norris, Hamlin Garland, and Willa Cather as one of our foremost celebrators of a sense of place. Having devoted more than four decades to his regional project, he brings together observations on everything from windmills, signs, pit silos, and lutefisk suppers to sod and rammed-earth houses, cast-iron grave markers, roads, and blizzard narratives. Readers will be the richer for it. John E. Miller, author of numerous books on the Midwest and Great Plains, including most recently, Democracy and the Informed Citizen: A South Dakota Perspective Pacing Dakota is the work of a consummate regional historian and firmly-rooted plainsman. The work is sensate, literate, socially rooted, and thoughtfully situated. It is a book to savor for the tastes and textures of landscapes, of church suppers, of pheasant and rhubarb; for tales of plains people and their communities; and for thoughtful, empathetic, and unsentimental reflections on the stories that serve Dakotans in the historical present and yet-to-be-written future. Elizabeth Jameson, author of All that Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek and past president of the Western History Association Isern has wandered everywhere on what he calls the 'post-rural' plains of North Dakota. His unapologetic respect for plains life, from six-man football to the Christmas Eve candle festival at Canaan, reminds us that we live on a storied not a storybook landscape. Isern is no plains Pollyanna, but he refuses to fixate on the cliché of rural decline. Pacing Dakota will make you want to fire up the car, crank the windows down, and amble off the beaten path to where authenticity, integrity, and ethnicity continue to shape the North Dakota character. Clay Jenkinson, author of For the Love of North Dakota: Sundays with Clay in the Bismarck Tribune Pacing Dakota is an anthology of essays contemplating the history and culture of the Great Plains of North America. Historian Thomas Isern shares his ruminations on prairie churches, forgotten artifacts, and little-known stories connected to the land and the generations who have called it home. 'The eradication of wild buffalo from the Great Plains was symbolic of something larger: the killing off of most all large wild animals that happened with settlement of the prairies by farmers and ranchers. The large herbivores were killed off for eating; the large predators were killed off because they were incompatible with livestock husbandry.' A handful of black-and-white photographs and an index enhance this unique blend of historical scholarship, outdoors enthusiasm, culinary appreciation, cherished memories, and more. Pacing Dakota is highly recommended for both public library collections and personal reading lists. --The American History Shelf Isern’s voice should be familiar; he regularly offers up “Plains Folk: on North Dakota’s Prairie Public Radio. In Pacing Dakota , you cannot hear the actual timbre of his voice, but if you concentrate, you certainly can gain the conversational style, the friendly asides, the droll humor, and the intense affection Isern has for his adopted home state. Pacing Dakota is a grassroots celebration of North Dakota, with an occasional nod to Saskatchewan and South Dakota, in which Isern spins his narratives of German-Russian pastries, barn dances, semi-reformed prostitutes, the power of a church’s tolling bells, the resurrection of barns, and the making of memories. The point of it all is the celebration of one’s fellows and the ability of a good conversation “to invest the land with story, make a place of it, a work that is never finished…From the countless stories, sources first of mere delight, come certain emergences, patterns that constitute understandings, maybe even a grain of wisdom. We should all live s