Experience the hidden byways of America's prairies, steppes, and grasslands through the unerring eye of landscape photographer and educator David Skernick. Covering Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, these unforgettable panoramic images place the viewer directly into our country's vast interior, containing wild bison, longhorn cattle, freight trains, abandoned homesteads, and agricultural patterns with startling geometries. The journey also passes through parts of the iconic Route 66 that most travelers never see. Skernick, who leads photography workshops nationwide, lets us in on his camera strategies, with an appendix listing exposure, equipment, and panorama statistics for each image--enough to satisfy even the most technology-minded photographer.

National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.

Do you like small towns, places off the beaten path, trips down memory lane? Ever wonder if old-fashioned values are still alive in America? Then kick back, unwind, and hop onboard with travel writer Bill Graves as he takes you On the Back Roads. Graves has a knack for finding the quirky, the offbeat in some of the most obscure, yet fascinating, small towns on the map. Among the places and faces he discovers: a town where it's against the law not to own a gun, a town famous for its split pea soup, the wise 83-year-old Emmy who camps alone in the dessert, and a man who hunts live ants for a living. The list goes on! Retired and free to roam in his motorhome, the &“RV Author,&” Bill Graves, logs 40,000 miles through the western states of California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming.

This first comparative study sketches the differences as well as the common threads that bind these groups together.

Experience the hidden byways of the great Pacific Northwest through the unerring eye of landscape photographer and educator David Skernick. Covering Washington and Oregon, these unforgettable panoramic images place the viewer directly into remote areas containing pristine coastline, small towns, thick forests, and abundant waterfalls and wildlife. Skernick, who leads photography workshops nationwide, lets us in on his camera strategies, with an appendix listing exposure, equipment, and panorama statistics for each image--enough to satisfy even the most technology-minded photographer.

The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the Plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. ø The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. R”lvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature?s furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains.

While the Goose Island Ramblers are a remarkable group, they are entirely representative of the many bands who, from the 1920s through the 90s, have synthesized an array of "foreign," "American," folk, popular, and hillbilly musical strains to entertain rural, small town, working class audiences throughout the Midwest. Based on more than twenty years of field research, this study of the Goose Island Ramblers alters our perception of what American folk music really is. The music of the Ramblers - decidedly upper Midwest, multicultural, and inescapably American - argues for a most inclusive, fluid notion of American folk music, one that exchanges ethnic hierarchy for egalitarianism, that stresses process over pedigree, and that emphasizes the pluralism of American musical culture. Rootsy, constantly evolving, and wildly eclectic, the polkabilly music of the Ramblers constitutes the American folk music norm, redefining in the process our understanding of American folk traditions.

To the fan, the rodeo cowboy is the distinctly American embodiment of the romantic Old West. But to the young men who live the profession, the realities are modest pay, continuous travel, and the constant threat of injury. While he was the Denver bureau chief of the New York Times, Dirk Johnson spent a year on the professional rodeo circuit with cowboys, watching them try to hang on to bucking horses and Brahma bulls?and to wives and livelihoods that seemed only one fall away from disappearing. Biting the Dust covers the circuit?s biggest events in Denver, the capital of the New West, to small towns on the Great Plains like McCook, Nebraska, where rodeo continues to thrive even as the population shrinks. Johnson takes the reader beyond sentimental visions of the rodeo cowboy and the American West and provides an unforgettable and authentic story of the rodeo today.

Raw account of modern day Oglala Sioux who now live on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation.

"There is a map you decide to call a book. A book of the territories youÕve traveled. A map is a meaning you hold against the unknowing. The places you speak in many directions." For Diane Glancy, there are books that you open like a map. In-between Places is such a book: a collection of eleven essays unified by a common concern with landscape and its relation both to our spiritual life and to the craft of writing. Taking readers on a trip to New Mexico, a voyage across the sea of middle America, even a journey to China, Glancy has crafted a sustained meditation on the nature and workings of language, stories, and poems; on travel and motion as metaphors for life and literature; and on the relationships between Native American and Judeo-Christian ways of thinking and being in the world. Reflecting on strip mines in Missouri ("as long as there is anything left to take, human industry will take it") and hog barns in Iowa (writing about them from the hogs' perspective), Glancy speaks in the margins of cross-cultural issues and from the places in-between as she explores the middle ground between places that we handle with the potholder of language. She leaves in her wake a dance of words and the structures left after the collision of cultures. A writer who has often examined her native heritage, Glancy also asks here what it means to be part white. "What does whiteness look like viewed from the other, especially when that other is also within oneself?" And in considering the legacy of Christianity, she ponders "how it is when the Holy Ghost enters your life like a brother-in-law you know is going to be there a while." Insightful and provocative, In-between Places is a book for anyone interested in a sense of place and in the relationship between religion and our stance toward nature. It is also a book for anyone who loves thoughtful writing and wishes to learn from a modern master of language.