Iowa History Reader

Marvin Bergman

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781609380113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1978 historian Joseph Wall wrote that Iowa was "still seeking to assert its own identity.... It has no real center where the elite of either power, wealth, or culture may congregate. Iowa, in short, is middle America." In this collection of well-written and accessible essays, originally published in 1996, seventeen of the Hawkeye State's most accomplished historians reflect upon the dramatic and not-so-dramatic shifts in the middle land's history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Marvin Bergman has drawn upon his years of editing the Annals of Iowa to gather contributors who cross disciplines, model the craft of writing a historical essay, cover more than one significant topic, and above all interpret history rather than recite it. In his preface to this new printing, he calls attention to publications that begin to fill the gaps noted in the 1996 edition.Rather than survey the basic facts, the essayists engage readers in the actual making of Iowa's history by trying to understand the meaning of its past. By providing comprehensive accounts of topics in Iowa history that embrace the broader historiographical issues in American history, such as the nature of Progressivism and Populism, the debate over whether women's expanded roles in wartime carried over to postwar periods, and the place of quantification in history, the essayists contribute substantially to debates at the national level at the same time that they interpret Iowa's distinctive culture.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface to the University of Iowa Press Edition
• Introduction
• Iowa: The Middle Land
• “We Dance in Opposite Directions”: Mesquakie (Fox)Separatism from the Sac and Fox Tribe
• The Frontier in Process: Iowa’s Trail Women as a Paradigm
• Farming in the Prairie Peninsula, 1830-1890
• The Political Culture of Antebellum Iowa:An Overview
• “Men Did Not Take to the Musket More Commonlythan Women to the Needle”: Annie Wittenmyerand Soldiers’ Aid
• Iowans and the Politics of Race in America,1857–1880
• Town Development, Social Structure, andIndustrial Conflict
• Iowa’s Struggle for State Railroad Control
• Why the Populist Party Was Strong in Kansas andNebraska but Weak in Iowa
• Iowa, Wet or Dry? Prohibition and theFall of the GOP
• To Whom Much Is Given: The Social Identityof an Iowa Small Town in the Early Twentieth Century
• Rural Iowa in the 1920s and 1930s
• World War II and Rural Women
• The Modernization of Iowa’s Agricultural Structurein the Twentieth Century
• The Evolution of the Iowa Precinct Caucuses
• Iowa’s Abortion Battles of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s:Long-term Perspectives and Short-term Analyses
• Index
• Acknowledgments