Summer is the perfect time to catch up on your favorite shows or discover new ones. If you’re looking to augment your watch list with some bookish inspiration, enjoy this selection of UNP titles and authors who have been featured on the big screen.
From a new adaptation of a popular children’s series to a documentary about our national mammal, these books, films, and TV shows are the perfect excuse to lounge indoors as we approach the dog days of summer.
Little House on the Prairie
In Little House on the Prairie (starring Luke Bracey, Crosby Fitzgerald, and Alice Halsey) the close-knit Ingalls family builds a new life on the Western frontier, where the joys of nature and the struggle for survival are deeply intertwined.
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In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost (Nebraska, 2025) Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West. Hill’s fresh approach shows how this author forever changed the literary landscape of children’s and young adult literature in ways that remain vital and relevant today.
Lawmen: Bass Reeves
Lawmen: Bass Reeves (starring David Oyelowo, Lauren E. Banks, and Donald Sutherland) explores the life of Bass Reeves who, after escaping slavery, became the first Black deputy US marshal west of the Mississippi, capturing over 3,000 outlaws in his lifetime.
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The Bass Reeves Trilogy (Bison Books) by Sydney Thompson is an origin story in the true American tradition that places Bass Reeves firmly in our pantheon of heroes. This thrilling set of historical novels narrate a great man’s exploits amid the near-mythic world of the nineteenth-century frontier.
Black Gun, Silver Star (Bison Books, 2022) by Art T. Burton sifts through fact and legend to discover the truth about one of the most outstanding peace officers in late nineteenth-century America—and perhaps the greatest lawman of the Wild West era. Fluent in Creek and other regional Native languages, physically powerful, skilled with firearms, and a master of disguise, Reeves was exceptionally adept at apprehending fugitives and outlaws and his exploits were legendary in Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Back to the Frontier
Back to the Frontier follows three American families as they reimagine their lives as 1880s homesteaders, challenged to forgo modern comforts for life on the frontier.
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The First Migrants (Bison Books, 2023) recounts the largely unknown story of Black people who migrated from the South to the Great Plains between 1877 and 1920 in search of land and freedom. They exercised their rights under the Homestead Act to gain title to 650,000 acres, settling in all of the Great Plains states. could rise by their own talents and toil, unencumbered by Black codes, repression, and violence.
Homesteading the Plains (Nebraska, 2017) offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public’s perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars’ harshly negative and dismissive treatment.
The American Buffalo
The American Buffalo, a two-part, four-hour series, takes viewers on a journey through more than 10,000 years of North American history and across some of the continent’s most iconic landscapes, tracing the animal’s evolution, its significance to the Indigenous people and landscape of the Great Plains, its near extinction, and the efforts to bring the magnificent mammals back from the brink.
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Great Plains Bison (Bison Books, 2017) by Dan O’Brien traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population.
Losing Eden (Nebraska, 2023) by Sara Dant is structured around three important themes: balancing economic success and ecological destruction, creating and protecting public lands, and achieving sustainability. This new edition features a chapter on climate change in the American West, a larger reflection on the region’s multicultural history, updated current events, expanded and diversified suggested readings, along with new maps and illustrations.
Wild Idea (Bison Books, 2014) by Dan O’Brien is a book about how good food choices can influence federal policies and the integrity of our food system, and about the dignity and strength of a legendary American animal.
Stalking the Big Cat of Georgia
In this 2025 documentary, director Hal Jacobs goes behind the scenes to see what North Georgia author Jerry Grillo discovered about Hall of Famer Johnny Mize while writing his 2024 biography Big Cat.
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Big Cat (Nebraska, 2024) by Jerry Grillo is the first complete biography of Johnny Mize. Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dixie as a Bunyonesque slugger, a quiet but sharp-witted man from a broken home who became a professional player at seventeen, embarking on an extended tour of the expansive St. Louis Cardinals Minor League system.
From Rails to Trails
Edward Norton narrates the story of one of the most unlikely social movements in American history: the struggle to convert thousands of miles of abandoned railroads into trails for cycling and walking. Facing fierce opposition and legal challenges from private property owners, leaders fought to reclaim these corridors for the public, creating a national network of scenic, car-free paths.
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From Rails to Trails (Nebraska, 2021) by Peter Harnik is the fascinating tale of the rails-to-trails movement as well as a consideration of what the continued creation of rail-trails means for the future of Americans’ health, nonmotorized transportation networks, and communities across the country.
Save 50% on books during our Summer Reading Sale! Enter coupon code 6SUMM26 in the discount code field of your shopping cart and click “Apply.” Offer expires July 31, 2026 and is good for U.S. and Canadian shipments only.
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