You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-beater in the state semifinals of 1970, because that was a long time ago and a lot of miles, too, and was not necessarily the apex in the trajectory of local history. Or maybe it was, and everything since then has been downhill. This actually is a thing among Great Plains historians, the assumption of inevitable decline, such that scholars have adopted the term, declensionism, to describe it. Scholars devised the term, but the phenomenon is real, we feel it at the grassroots in prairie communities.

Our Best Days Are Behind Us

One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring overhead, eagles huddling over carrion on the road.

Something in the Earth

Tom Isern shares a Plains Folk essay, Give Us Our Try.

Give Us Our Try

One of the joys of my job is that I get to call fabulous experiences “work.” The most popular course I teach is the history of Australia and New Zealand, a region where I maintain active research interests. This compels me to fly over frequently to maintain my chops in the field.

Give Us Our Try!

The ancient beaches of Lake Agassiz are subtle features in the landscape, generally unnoticed except by persons specifically looking for them. I recognize some of the beaches when I cross them, but am too geologically ignorant to discern most of them. I do claim to know something about books, however. So I am embarrassed to confess how undiscerning I was on first reading Bill Redekop’s new book, Lake Agassiz: The Rise and Demise of the World’s Greatest Lake . I’ll resume my confession in a

The Beaches of Manitoba

Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."

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