Sarah Oltrogge, (515)
281-4011
Des
Moines, Iowa—
The State Historical Society of Iowa today recognized three of the most significant
books published on Iowa history in the last year at its annual Celebrating Community
History Awards at the State Historical Building.
Russell L.
Johnson earned the Historical Society’s Benjamin F. Shambaugh award for
his book, Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban
Industrial Society, published in 2003 by Fordham University Press.
Warriors
into Workers is a thoroughly researched study of Dubuque during and just
after the Civil War. In the book Johnson addresses such important questions as:
What kind of person enlisted to serve in the Civil War and why and how do they
compare to those who did not? Johnson argues that the discipline required for
military service prepared soldiers to be workers in the large-scale industrial
society that emerged in Dubuque and across the United States in the years after
the Civil War. Johnson is a professor of history at the University of Otago in
Dunedin, New Zealand.
Certificates
of Recognition were presented to John O. Anfinson for The River We Have Wrought:
A History of the Upper Mississippi, published by the University of Minnesota
Press; and to William B. Friedricks for In For The Long Haul: The Life of
John Ruan, published by Iowa State University Press.
In The
River We Have Wrought, Anfinson presents a carefully balanced history of
the upper Mississippi River, from early European exploration through the completion
of a navigable channel with a system of locks and dams in the mid-20th century.
Friedricks
gives a rare glimpse into the private life of John Ruan in In For The Long
Haul. Ruan was a Des Moines businessman whose trucking business made him
one of Iowa’s wealthiest and most influential people and became the foundation
for his vast holdings in insurance, banking, financial services, international
trade, real estate and a hotel.
The award
is named in honor of Benjamin F. Shambaugh who, for 40 years, was the superintendent
of the State Historical Society of Iowa, professor of political economy at the
University of Iowa, and one of the founders of the “new social science”
at the turn of the century.
###
Return
to What's New Section |
