The massive orphan train exodus whisked three-year-old Teresa from the safety of her New York orphanage, where the worst thing the Foundling nuns did was wash her curly black hair, to a desolate house and cold-hearted "parents" in Kansas. There she entered a small and strange Volga German world whose inhabitants spoke a language she had never heard. In this odd world, she encountered whippings and sexual abuse. Perhaps half a million children, like Teresa, were plucked from orphanages and shipped by rail (or "relocated") to nearly every state in the Union from 1854 to 1929. Mail-Order Kid looks at the orphan train movement through the eyes of one small child who yearns to know her "real" mother, survives a tortured childhood, and ultimately, as an adult, comes to terms with her past, her faith, and herself.

Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Coffey, Marilyn June

Historical

Out West Press

On they came, from Belgium and New Hampshire, from Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, from the Chicago fire, from the territories: Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, the Dakotas. All the way they brawled, about Indians, about border lines, about slavery, about who was the bigger imbecile. And then they fought County Seat Wars in most of the 3,000 new counties. A thousand of those remaining ended up in south central Nebraska, scrapping about Harlan County and which still-imagined town should hold the seat of government.

Thieves, Rascals, and Sore Losers: The Unsettling History of the Dirty Deals that Helped Settle Nebraska

History

Americas

Omega Cottonwood Press

Jack Loscutoff’s forte, as a writer, is the short story. Here, in A Line of Shorts, is a collection of some of his finest. Jack especially loved comical fiction. He enjoyed creating unlikely characters, like Sheriff Bob who’s nuts about writers. Or Sven, a typical Norwegian bachelor farmer who falls in love with an over-sexed parrot. Or Peggy, a wife who may (or may not) have returned from the dead. Or Robespierre, a rebellious runt pig who talks, or a Seven-Foot Woman. Jack also had a penchant for satire, including satirizing religion. His religious satires are somewhat realistic, like the mortician who lacks bodies, or science fiction, and other times just plain old sarcastic. All of Jack’s stories, whether “Breezy Stories” or “Holy Satires,” depend, not just on exaggerated characters and plots, but also on language. Jack was an amazing wordsmith. He had studied words, first Russian, then English, from boyhood, and he had close-to-perfect recall of every word he had encountered. He used them, with good humor, in A Line of Shorts.

A Line of Shorts: Breezy Stories & Holy Satires

Literature & Fiction

Loscutoff, Jack

Humor & Satire

Award-winning Great Plains writer Marilyn Coffey recounts her family's intricate dance with the Teamsters, beginning with her dad's tiny trucking company spawned on a front porch in 1929, in a David-and-Goliath encounter that spanned decades.In 1956, Tom Coffey knuckled under Jimmy Hoffa's six-month-long Teamsters strike. He sold his twenty-seven-year-old truckline, Coffey's Transfer Company, rather than sign Hoffa's contract. But the story didn't end there-and Hoffa didn't win after all. In 1958, the Coffey family gathered in Washington, DC, to see Tom testify against Jimmy Hoffa before then-Senator John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, the Rackets Committee's counsel who had sworn to put Hoffa behind bars. Get the exclusive insider's perspective with Marilyn's firsthand narrative of this feud in That Punk Jimmy Hoffa

That Punk Jimmy Hoffa: Coffey’s Transfer at War with the Teamsters

Arts & Literature

This is a story of a family in the early 1900s—a time when the anxiety of World War I was running high, the suffrage movement was in full swing across the country, and many families struggled to cope with a bleak and troubling outlook.\nIn her trademark storytelling style, author Marilyn June Coffey beautifully paints the portrait of a family, who despite the woes of the world outside, fills their home with love and warmth, along with the excitement of new opportunites for their future. 
The family watched with fear as an accident changed everything in one stroke, and colored their world with a different brush.

Zack's Left Hand: A Story of Loss and Recovery