New Titles
The Shining Hands of My Ponca Ancestors
In sincere, from-the-heart storytelling, The Shining Hands of My Ponca Ancestors depicts the life of a young, contemporary Ponca, who—with the help of friends, relatives, spirits, and ancestors—is learning what is really possible for him and his tribe and how dramatically different that is from the dominant cultural messaging of his youth. An account of inspiration, ancestor intervention, the indestructible Indigenous core of his Native people, and the immense beauty of an ongoing way of life, Shining Hands is rife with meaning for Native and non-Native readers alike. Viewed through his personal life, Shining Hands is a prayer for the young that they may see their own powerful potential, too.
History & Memory in German-Russian Country
The Germans from Russia—an agricultural people who settled, survived, and prospered—formed strong ethnic communities where farmers still plant and harvest, the faithful still gather for worship, and the cooks still feed their families from the garden. This is a story of German-Russian persistence on the northern plains and its emergent consciousness—a sort of heritage husbandry—in the late twentieth century.
Echoes of the Old Country: Growing Up German-Russian on the Northern Plains
Unique in its topic and methodology, Echoes of the Old Country reveals purpose and power in childhood memory for the Germans from Russia who survived and prospered on the northern Great Plains. Historian Jessica Clark’s study draws on nearly two hundred oral interviews collected during the Dakota Memories Oral History Project, conducted from 2005 to 2010. Clark and a team of oral historians and videographers recorded the voices and memories of participants as they responded to various memory prompts—browsing scrapbooks and diaries or walking through towns and cemeteries where familiar storefronts and headstones stirred vivid recollections. No history of childhood draws from such a rich oral history source. Clark reveals that second-and third-generation German-Russians adhered to a collective identity rooted in the struggles and hardships experienced by their immigrant forebears. Yet, they simultaneously forged a new identity—one that found sport in chores and responsibilities and joy in pranks and play. Their evolving self-image contrasts with narratives of toil and deprivation often associated with growing up in rural and agricultural environments.
Catch and Release
Charles “Catch” Sherman has lived at the corner of Fourth and Lafayette—in the house his grandfather built—his entire life. While content in the river town of Beaumont, Iowa, he knows life will be different for his eldest daughter, Edie, a gifted physics student. Set in the late 1950s through the 1970s, Catch and Release is a story about holding on, letting go, and the leaps we must take to become the people we are meant to be.
Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century
PRESALE: In celebration of the forthcoming Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century, we are pleased to offer the First Chapters Edition. This special, limited edition is a teaser as we eagerly await the five hundred copies of our Champagne Times Limited Edition. We present the First Chapters Edition as a placeholder until we can ship your hardcover copy mid-July 2025. Each order placed for Champagne Times will receive First Chapters in advance while our supply lasts.
With apologies, we will not be able to ship out orders for this item until early September due to circumstances beyond our control. The books have been printed, but the printing and assembling of the slip-cases to hold them are behind schedule.
Over seventy years after his debut on KTLA in Los Angeles, and nearly decades after his debut on ABC in 1955, Lawrence Welk's unprecedented and almost continuous run on network, syndicatged, and now public television confirms his place in American entertainment history. From his childhood in a small, German-speaking immigrant community on the North Dakota plains to one of the richest and most recognizable entertainers of his generation, Lawrence's story is a microcosm of the national experience during the American Century.
By telling his story, author Lance Byron Richey came to understand the experience of assimilation and secularization, war and peace, and Depression and prosperity that his generation of Americans lived through in the twentieth century. In the process, the supposedly traditional and timeless values Lawrence mythologized for his audience were revealed as just as time-bound and transient as those of the Baby Boomer generation that supplanted him and his generation as the arbiters of cultural taste.
Most importantly, though, as a man, Richey came to see Lawrence in his moral simplicity and personal complexity, a deeply good and decent man whose family often paid the price for his unquenchable desire for success and security, which his childhood on a North Dakota farm had implanted in him. In short, Welk's story is a quintessentially American story.
The first edition of Champagne Times is limited to five hundred numbered copies, all of which have been signed by the author. The book covers are SKIVERTEX Vellin #5517 blue casing, premium grade, simulated leather material debossed with gold foil. They are designed by Deb Tanner; printed and bound by Thomson Reuters Core Publishing Solutions.
Lance Byron Richey serves as President of the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he also holds the rank of Professor of Theology. A graduate of Furman University (B.A. in History, 1988) and Conception Seminary College (Certificate of Pre-Theological Studies, 1991), he studied both Philosophy (PhD 1995) and Religious Studies (PhD, 2004) at Marquette University i Milwaukee, Wisconsin; he as published widely in both disciplines. Lance and his wife, Carol, have five children.
LCCN: 2025938196
ISBN: 978-1-946163-76-9
Volume 1: Fire in the Belly (1903-1945)
Volume 2: Evening Star (1945-1963)
Volume 3: A Rock in the Storme (1964-1992)
Page Count: Vol. 1, 400pp; Vol. 2, 416pp; Vol. 3, 408 + 16 color pp, totaling 424pp
Photo Count: Vol. 1, 37 b&w; Vol. 2, 39 b&w; Vol. 3, 36 b&w, 16 color pp.
Hardcover, packed in slip-case, limited edition, signed and numbered
Publication Year: 2025
Dakota Dreaming
Dakota Dreaming returns us to the ancient core of poetry a spiritual quest. But this book offers no standard hero's journey--no daring descent int the underworld, no triumphant, hopeful return. It offers, rather, a gathering of visions received by one who has learned to dwell indefinitely in the liminal space between realms. While much of the collection in written in the Japanese haibun form, Buettner's imagery is rooted deep in North American prairie soil. Her poems are like "abandoned houses that let the gold of afternoon light filter in through open windows," offering some brief, imperfect respite for "those of us who have lost our way." And when the daylight fades and darkness becomes complete, Buettner guides us: "I borrow the light / of snow."
--Brendan Stermer, author of Forgotten Frequencies (NDSU Press, 2023)