B.J. Hollars and his six-year-old son, Henry, hop in the car to strike out on a 2,500-mile road trip retracing the Oregon Trail. Their mission: to rediscover America, and Americans, along the way. Throughout their two-week adventure, they endure the usual setbacks (car trouble, inclement weather, and father-son fatigue), but their most compelling drama involves people, privilege, and their attempt to find common ground in an all-too-fractured country.

In Forts of the Northern Plains, Jeff Barnes presents an informative guidebook to the forts of the Indian campaigns of the late nineteenth century. Focusing on sites in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, Barnes includes the forts’ histories, descriptions of what remains today, directions, nearby points of interest, and visitor information for each post.

In this article, Husa recounts a 1916 effort by the Association of American Geographers to establish and classify various land regions in the U.S, leading to a debate about the exact borders of the Great Plains and the Midwest.

The Bears of Grand Teton is the first comprehensive history of bears, black and grizzly, and their interactions with people in Grand Teton National Park and the surrounding area of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It is also a personal account by Sue Consolo-Murphy, who spent thirty years as a wildlife manager for the National Park Service.

In the summer of 1883 Belgian travel writer Jules Leclercq spent ten days on horseback in Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, exploring myriad natural wonders: astonishing geysers, majestic waterfalls, the vast lake, and the breathtaking canyon. He also recorded the considerable human activity, including the rampant vandalism. Leclercq’s account of his travels is itself a small marvel blending natural history, firsthand impressions, scientific lore, and anecdote.

The Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska covers over twelve thousand miles in all ninety-three counties of the “state where the West begins.” Readers can become acquainted with numerous folklore tales and discover the locations of thousands of historical sites, burials, pioneer roads, museums, and other wonders of the Cornhusker State.

In contrast to what many experienced in older eastern states, pioneers coming west found a more challenging landscape. Early boosters and promoters along with territorial and state governments across the Great Plains sought to rectify the situation, or at least put a positive spin on it. This project takes the idea of boosterism and connects it to early tree-planting efforts in the central Great Plains—specifically Kansas and Nebraska—to present the region as a progressive, soon-to-be forested wonderland.

One of the best primary accounts of the Utah War comes from William Clark, a young teamster hired by Russell, Majors and Waddell, the West’s greatest freighters. Clark’s narrative, “A Trip Across the Plains in 1857,” was not published until 1922 and only then in an obscure journal with little annotation. MacKinnon and Alford have remedied this historiographical oversight by providing material entirely missing from the original printing.

Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises—both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.

When people think about space travel, they usually look skyward. But much of spaceflight history happened down here on Earth. Space Age Adventures presents more than one hundred terrestrial sites across the United States related to space exploration, where enthusiasts can have their own space age adventures.