Once upon a time, salad was iceberg lettuce with a few shredded carrots and a cucumber slice, if you were lucky. A vegetable side was potatoes—would you like those baked, mashed, or au gratin? A nice anniversary dinner? Would you rather visit the Holiday Inn or the Regency Inn? In Grand Forks, North Dakota, a small town where professors moonlight as farmers, farmers moonlight as football coaches, and everyone loves hockey, one woman has had the answers for more than twenty-five years: Marilyn Hagerty. In her weekly Eatbeat column in the local paper, Marilyn gives the denizens of Grand Forks the straight scoop on everything from the best blue plate specials—beef stroganoff at the Pantry—to the choicest truck stops—the Big Sioux (and its lutefisk lunch special)—to the ambience of the town's first Taco Bell. Her verdict? "A cool pastel oasis on a hot day." No-nonsense but wry, earnest but self-aware, Eatbeat also encourages the best in its readers—reminding them to tip well and why—and serves as its own kind of down-home social register, peopled with stories of ex–postal workers turned café owners and prom queen waitresses. Filled with reviews of the mom-and-pop diners that eventually gave way to fast-food joints and the Norwegian specialties that finally faded away in the face of the Olive Garden's endless breadsticks, Grand Forks is more than just a loving look at the shifts in American dining in the last years of the twentieth century—it is also a surprisingly moving and hilarious portrait of the quintessential American town, one we all recognize in our hearts regardless of where we're from.

Heads above Water tells the stories of women and their families who survived the Grand Forks, North Dakota, flood of 1997, one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. This book describes the challenges women faced and explores the importance of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability in their disaster recovery. The women found themselves face-to-face with social and familial upheaval, emotional and physical trauma, precarious economic and social status, and feelings of loss and violation. By exploring the experiences of these women, author Alice Fothergill contributes to broader sociological discussions about women's changing roles, the stigma of needing and receiving assistance, family relationships under stress, domestic violence, downward mobility, and the importance of "home" to one's identity and sense of self. Heads above Water offers poignant insight into women's everyday lives in an extraordinary time.

When a devastating tornado hit Grand Forks and East Grand Forks on June 16, 1887, nobody saw it coming. Even the United States Signal Service believed there was a northern limit for tornadoes in the United States. The frontier towns of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks were located about seventyfive miles north of Fargo, which was thought to be at the northern tip of the Tornado Belt. Leaders of each town proudly claimed that their communities did not have to worry about the destructive power of tornadoes. The tornado of 1887 changed everything. Reshaping the Tornado Belt discusses: How Grand Forks and East Grand Forks evolved What happened when country schoolhouses were blown across the prairie with teachers and students trapped inside What the two shattered towns had to do in the aftermath of the tornado to rebuild their communities Eyewitness accounts of the tornado as it traveled twenty miles Full of maps and figures and painstakingly researched by three weather professionals, Reshaping the Tornado Belt tells an important story about how a horrific tornado challenged and reshaped two communities and changed how the world looks at tornadoes.

In the late 1800s, Norwegian immigrants began flooding into the Red River Valley. As they moved into the Grand Forks area, they brought their Old World folkways and religious practices. On the corner of Third and Walnut, Norwegian Lutherans built a small sanctuary to house their services. The building mirrored the simple worship of the Hauge Synod, the organization to which this congregation belonged. After merging with two other Norwegian churches in town, the old Trinity Lutheran structure passed into the hands of the Grand Forks Church of God, a congregation that echoed the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening. This is the story of a church building and the two assemblies that utilized it over a 100-year period.