The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America by Marilyn Irvin Holt

From 1850 to 1930 America witnesses a unique emigration and resettlement of at least 100,000 children and several thousand adults, primarily from the East Coast to the West.

The author catches the children's perspective with liberal use or oral histories, institutional records, and newspaper accounts.

Marilyn Irvin Holt, former director of publications at the Kansas Historical Society, is a freelance editor, writer, and researcher and teaches historical editing at the University of Kansas.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Logan

The dust clouds that terrorized America's High plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before.

Author Timothy Egan tells the epic story of the environmental disaster that occurred in the "Dirty Thirties."

Author Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize award winning journalist currently working for the New York Times.

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich

In this classic story of a pioneer woman, Bess Streeter Aldrich modeled protagonist Abbie Deal after her own mother. In this book, Abbie accompanies her family to Iowa. She marries, and in 1865 moves with husband Will to the soon-to-be-state of Nebraska. She settles into her own sod house. The novel describes Abbie's years of child-raising and of making a frontier home able to withstand every adversity. Refusing to be broken by hard experiences, Abbie sets a joyful example for her family, and her readers. Among many other notable books by Aldrich are The Rim of the Prairie and Spring Came on Forever.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's masterful portrait of prairie culture, based on her own life. Against Nebraska's panoramic landscape, Cather recreates the life of an immigrant girl who becomes, in the memories of narrator Jim Burden, the epitome of strong and dignifed womanhood.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Willa Cather once famously observed, "The end is nothing; the road is all." Cather herself made the most of the road she traveled, wearing an indelible literary path studded with classic American novels from O Pioneers! to My Ántonia.

Pioneer Doctor: The Story of a Woman's Work by Mari Grana

The true story of Dr. Mary Babcock Atwater is creatively retold by her grandaughter, award-winning author Mari Grana. 

Learn the story of a pioneer doctor, suffragette, and crusador who found freedom and opportunity among the miners of Bannack, Montana.

Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction by Nell Irvin Painter

In 1879, sixteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of blacks fled the south heading for the homestead lands of Kansas, the 'Garden Spot of the West.'

"What makes this book so important is.... [that it] is the first full length scholarly study of this migration and of the forces that produced it." David H. Donald for the New York Times Book Review

An Unspeakable Sadness: The Disposition of the Nebraska Indians by David J. Wishart

"An even-handed, elegantly presented and thoroughly researched example of the sort of work historical geographers need to be doing." Journal of Historical Geography

"A Well-written and authoritative work." Great Plains Quarterly

David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He is author of The Fur Trade of the American West 1807-1840: A Geographical Synthesis.

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey edited by Lillian Schlissel

"Important for anyone who wants a clearer understanding of the people, and particularly the women, who shaped a good part of the nation." New York Times

"These chronicles show an aspect of the westward saga seldom seem before and never in such depth.....Absorbing, informative, sobering reading." Wall Street Journal

Lillian Schlissel is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College. She is co-editor of Far From Home: Families of the Westward Journey and of The Western Women's Reader.

Birds of Nebraska: Field Guide by Stan Tekiela

Make bird watching in Nebraska even more enjoyable.

Make bird identification easierk, more informative, adn productive.

Author Stan Tekiela is a naturalist and wildlife photographer who writes a syndicated nature column and appears on a number of nature radio shows.

Roadside Geology of Nebraska by Harmon D. Maher, Jr., George F. Engelmann, and Robert D. Shuster

Enliven your next trip across the prairie with this comprehensive guide to Nebraska's surprisingly diverse geology. 

From Toadstool Geologic Park to Scotia Chalk Mine to Ashfalls Fossil Beds State Historical Park to the largest dune field in the Western Hemisphere; Nebraska has a lot to discover.

Roadside History of Nebraska by Candy Moulton

"In this [guide], one can learn of Nebraska's colorful past and also gain contemporary insights.  Moulton takes us beyond the main towns and highways to give the reader and traveler a true flavor of life here in the Cornhusker State." Thomas R. Buecker, Curator, Fort Robinson Museum; Crawford, Nebraska