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 40 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 farm boy. 

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. 

Praise for 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)