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Iowa Heritage Illustrated Goes Back to School
Coinciding
with the start of Iowa schools, the fall issue of Iowa Heritage Illustrated
explores a cutting-edge educational technique in 1930s classrooms: audio-visual
materials. Used to teach social studies and geography, stereograph images featured
the Lincoln Highway of 1935, with a dozen views of Iowa, some never before published.
Another article traces the paving of a "Seedling Mile" on the Iowa stretch of the Lincoln Highway in 1919 — one of only six Seedling Miles in the nation. Designed to promote local paving of the transcontinental highway, the Seedling Mile, in execution, was anything but smooth. Marshall, Pottawattamie, and Linn counties all vied for the stretch of concrete.
Speaking
of Marshall County, speculator and businessman Henry Anson rode into the county
in 1851, began buying acres of prairie, and he founded Marshalltown. Read Anson's
story in this issue.
Concluding the issue are wonderful historical photos of Iowans enjoying good
times in their Victorian parlors. This is an issue you won't want to miss!
Annals of Iowa Revisits Fair, Canning Industry
In
the next issue of The Annals of Iowa Chris Rasmussen portrays the ways
history has been presented at the Iowa State Fair from its founding in 1854 to
its centennial exhibition in 1946. Rasmussen shows how the fair’s exhibits
and its entertainments, always in some tension with one another, suggested nearly
antithetical views of history and of the certainty of progress. While the fair’s
exhibits represented steady progress, its most popular grandstand entertainments
in the early twentieth century — nightly disaster spectacles — brooded
over the threat of precipitous decline.
In addition, Derek Oden offers a survey of the development of Iowa's canning industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He reviews the obstacles canneries encountered as well as their relationship to town boosters, the farmers with whom they contracted, and the workers they employed. He concludes that the canneries offered economic benefits to the communities in which they were located, most notably jobs and an outlet for farm products, but those benefits came with some social costs.
The issue also includes the usual complement of book reviews as well as the
annual index.
