University Of Iowa Press: 221 books
On Behalf of the Family Farm
Iowa Farm Women's Activism since 1945
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
On Behalf of the Family Farm traces the development of women’s activism and agrarian feminisms in the Midwest after 1945, as farm women’s lives were being transformed by the realities of modern agriculture. Author Jenny Barker Devine demonstrates that in an era when technology, depopulation, and...
by Evelyn Birkby
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2012
In 1949, Iowa farm wife Evelyn Birkby began to write a weekly column entitled “Up a Country Lane” for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel, now called the Valley News. Sixty-three years, one Royal typewriter, and five computers later, she is still creating a weekly record of the lives and interests...
Life and Adventures of Jack Engle
An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters
Language: English
Release Date: February 17, 2017
In 1852, young Walt Whitman—a down-on-his-luck housebuilder in Brooklyn—was hard at work writing two books. One would become one of the most famous volumes of poetry in American history, a free-verse revelation beloved the world over, Leaves of Grass. The other, a novel, would be published under...
Workshops of Empire
Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2015
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual...
Ecological Restoration in the Midwest
Past, Present, and Future
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2018
Most people do not realize it, but the Midwest has been at the forefront of ecological restoration longer than perhaps any other region in the United States, dating back to the 1930s. Because of its industrial history, agricultural productivity, and natural features such as the Great Lakes, the Midwest...
by Linzee Kull McCray
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2015
A milestone in perception occurred in 1971, when the Whitney Museum of American Art displayed quilts in a museum setting: Abstract Design in American Quilts bestowed institutional recognition of the artistry inherent in these humble textiles. In subsequent decades, quilting’s popularity exploded....
The Small-Town Midwest
Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2016
Most people in the United States live in urban areas; still, there are nearly fifty million people living in small towns of just a few thousand people or less. Some towns are within a short drive of a metropolitan area where people can work, shop, or go to school; some are an hour or more from any...
The Jefferson Highway
Blazing the Way from Winnepeg to New Orleans
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2016
Today American motorists can count on being able to drive to virtually any town or city in the continental United States on a hard surface. That was far from being true in the early twentieth century, when the automobile was new and railroads still dominated long-distance travel. Then, the roads confronting...
The Ghosts of NASCAR
The Harlan Boys and the First Daytona 500
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2013
Who won the first Daytona 500? Fans still debate whether it was midwestern champion Johnny Beauchamp, declared the victor at the finish line, or longtime NASCAR driver Lee Petty, declared the official winner a few days after the race. The Ghosts of NASCAR puts the controversial finish under a microscope....
A Sugar Creek Chronicle
Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2016
In 2010, while editing a report on the effects of climate change in Iowa, ecologist Cornelia Mutel came to grips with the magnitude and urgency of the problem. She already knew the basics: greenhouse gas emissions and global average temperatures are rising on a trajectory that could, within decades,...
Down from the Mountaintop
From Belief to Belonging
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2014
A lyrical coming-of-age memoir, Down from the Mountaintop chronicles a quest for belonging. Raised in northwestern Montana by Pentecostal homesteaders whose twenty-year experiment in subsistence living was closely tied to their faith, Joshua Doležal experienced a childhood marked equally by his parents’...
by Sara Egge
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2018
Winner of the 2019 Gita Chaudhuri Prize
Winner of the 2019 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award
Historian Sara Egge offers critical insights into the woman suffrage movement by exploring how it emerged in small Midwestern communities—in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County,...
The Quack's Daughter
A True Story about the Private Life of a Victorian College Girl, Revised Edition
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
Raised in the gritty Mississippi River town of Davenport, Iowa, Cora Keck could have walked straight out of a Susan Glaspell story. When Cora was sent to Vassar College in the fall of 1884, she was a typical unmotivated, newly rich party girl. Her improbable educational opportunity at “the first...
The Future of Family Farms
Practical Farmers' Legacy Letters Project
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2016
A monumental transfer of farmland is occurring in the United States. The average American farmer is fifty-eight years old, and the 40 percent of farmland owners who lease their land to others are even older: sixty-six on average. Five times as many farmers are over sixty-five as are under thirty-five....