Table of Contents, Third Series, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter 2010
The Life and Legacy of Jack Trice
by Dorothy Schwieder
DOROTHY SCHWIEDER, University Professor Emerati of History at Iowa State University, recounts the life of Jack Trice up until he died in 1923 as a result of an injury he suffered during his second game as the only African American member of the Iowa State College football team. Then she relates the long struggle to rename Iowa State’s football stadium in his honor. In both cases she sets the story in the context of changing racial and social attitudes.
“The Secret to a Successful Farm Organization”:
Township Farm Bureau Women’s Clubs in Iowa, 1945–1970
by Jenny Barker Devine
JENNY BARKER DEVINE, assistant professor of history at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, interprets the programming of Farm Bureau women’s clubs from 1945 to 1970. After nearly three decades of strong state-centered programming, club activities in the postwar period, she concludes, were characterized by a greater focus on local leadership. State leaders continued to advise local clubwomen to engage in activities related to politics, agricultural policy, and the like, but members of township clubs became increasingly selective in responding to state leaders’ advice, focusing more narrowly on their neighborhoods, social events, and new trends in homemaking. Devine interprets this response not as an indicator of resistance or rejection of state leaders but rather as the manifestation of “social feminisms” in the countryside.
Book Reviews and Notices
New on the Shelves
Index
John Wesley Elkins, Boy Murderer, and His Struggle for Pardon
By Patricia L. Bryan
PATRICIA L. BRYAN, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, tells the story of John Wesley Elkins. In 1890, the 12-year-old Elkins was convicted of murdering his parents and sentenced to life in prison at the State Penitentiary at Anamosa. Bryan relates his years of struggle for pardon in the context of changing attitudes about crime and punishment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Dateline Orange City, Iowa:
De Volksvriend and the Creation of Dutch American Community in the Midwest, 1874–1951
By Robert Schoone-Jongen
ROBERT SCHOONE-JONGEN, who teaches history at Calvin College, offers a portrait of the Dutch language newspaper, De Volksvriend, published in Orange City from 1874 to 1951. He focuses particularly on the published correspondence that came to the paper from all over the country, creating an “imagined community” of Dutch Americans that eased their passage from the Old World to the New.
Gender and the Civil War:
A Review Essay
by Leslie A. Schwalm
Book Reviews and Notices
New on the Shelves
“Halt, Blind, Lame, Sick, and Lazy”:
Care of the Poor in Cedar County, Iowa, 1857–1890
--by Marilyn L. Olson
MARILYN L. OLSON, a clinical pharmacist at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, describes the administration and distribution of poor relief in Cedar County between 1857 and 1890. She shows how Cedar County officials sought to balance their legal obligation to provide adequate care for the poor with their obligation to local taxpayers for budgetary restraint. By covering support for the poor outside the poorhouse as well as at the poorhouse itself, she reveals the broad networks of social support available in a nineteenth-century rural county.
“This Large Household”:
Architecture and Civic Identity at the
Iowa Hospital for the Insane at Mount Pleasant
--by Jane Simonsen
JANE SIMONSEN, assistant professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, relates the architecture of the Hospital for the Insane in Mount Pleasant — and the evolution of that architecture over the course of the nineteenth century — to Iowans’ understanding of the nature of mental illness and to their ideas about home, family, gender roles, domestic virtues, and institutional authority.
African American Migration to the Midwest:
A Review Essay
—by Allison Gorsuch
Book Reviews and Notices
New on the Shelves
Announcement
Table of Contents, Third Series, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter 2010“A Grand and Patriotic Pilgrimage”:
The Iowa Civil War Monuments Dedication Tour of 1906
--by William C. Lowe
WILLIAM C. LOWE, dean and professor of history at Ashford University in Clinton, Iowa, recounts the events surrounding the tour taken by Governor Cummins and other Iowa officials to dedicate Iowa’s new Civil War monuments at Andersonville and at the Civil War battlefield parks at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Shiloh. He also analyzes how the commemorations participated in prevailing ways of remembering the Civil War.
North Side Revolutionaries in the Civil Rights Struggle:
The African American Community in Des Moines
and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1948–1970
--by Bruce Fehn and Robert Jefferson
BRUCE FEHN AND ROBERT JEFFERSON describe how the Des Moines chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense emerged in 1968 out of African Americans’ efforts to survive and thrive under particular local conditions of racism, discrimination, and segregation. The authors conclude that the Black Panthers gave a radical shove to black politics but also drew on the support of traditional African American leaders and even some sympathetic members of the white community in Des Moines.
Book Reviews and Notices
New on the Shelves
Announcement