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Books by Clay Jenkinson

  • The Language of Cottonwoods: Essays on the Future of North Dakota

    The Language of Cottonwoods: Essays on the Future of North Dakota

    North Dakota is regarded as flyover country, but extraordinary narratives play out on this improbable Great Plains landscape. North Dakota is the home of one of the world’s largest nuclear missile fields, one of the first mosques in America, a zany collection of roadside attractions, resurgent Native American communities, one of the nation’s most productive oil fields, and the magnificent Little Missouri River badlands.

    Join Clay Jenkinson as he searches for spirit of place, cultural identity, sacred landscapes, and a future for rural America at the center of the continent, where Lewis and Clark wintered, Sitting Bull resisted the conquest, and Theodore Roosevelt became America’s leading conservationist and the exemplar of the strenuous life.

    Part travelogue, part love song to the prairie, and above all, a vision for a cultural renaissance at the heart of the continent, The Language of Cottonwoods will make you laugh, cry, and think, and inspire you to visit North Dakota.


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Clay Jenkinson is a North Dakotan, a plainsman who has spent his life exploring the northern Great Plains. He is a frequent "talking head" in Ken Burns' documentary films, the creator of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, and the host of the nationally syndicated radio program and podcast, The Thomas Jefferson Hour. He studied at the University of Minnesota and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. This is his fourteenth book.