Dubuque S Forgotten Cemetery

Atop a scenic bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and downtown Dubuque there once lay a graveyard dating to the 1830s, the earliest days of American settlement in Iowa. Though many local residents knew the property had once been a Catholic burial ground, they believed the graves had been moved to a new cemetery in the late nineteenth century in response to overcrowding and changing burial customs. But in 2007, when a developer broke ground for a new condominium complex here, the heavy machinery unearthed human bones. Clearly, some of Dubuque’s early settlers still rested there—in fact, more than anyone expected. For the next four years, staff with the Burials Program of the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist excavated the site so that development could proceed. The excavation fieldwork was just the beginning. Once the digging was done each summer, skeletal biologist Robin M. Lillie and archaeologist Jennifer E. Mack still faced the enormous task of teasing out life histories from fragile bones, disintegrating artifacts, and the decaying wooden coffins the families had chosen for the deceased. Poring over scant documents and sifting through old newspapers, they pieced together the story of the cemetery and its residents, a story often surprising and poignant. Weaving together science, history, and local mythology, the tale of the Third Street Cemetery provides a fascinating glimpse into Dubuque’s early years, the hardships its settlers endured, and the difficulties they did not survive. While they worked, Lillie and Mack also grappled with the legal and ethical obligations of the living to the dead. These issues are increasingly urgent as more and more of America’s unmarked (and marked) cemeteries are removed in the name of progress. Fans of forensic crime shows and novels will find here a real-world example of what can be learned from the fragments left in time’s wake.

This volume centers on the application of social theory to commingled remains with special focus on the cultural processes that create the assemblages as a way to better understand issues of meaning, social structure and interaction, and lived experience in the past. The importance of the application of theoretical frameworks to bioarchaeology in general has been recognized, but commingled and fragmentary assemblages require an increased theoretical focus. Too often these assemblages are still relegated to appendices; they are analytical puzzles that need the interpretive power offered by social theory. Theoretical Approaches to Analysis and Interpretation of Commingled Human Remains provides case studies that illustrate how an appropriate theoretical model can be used with commingled and fragmentary remains to add to overall site and population level interpretations of past and present peoples. Specifically, the contributions show a blending and melding of different social theories, highlighting the broad interpretive power of social theory. Contributors are drawn from both the Old and New World. Temporally, time periods from the Neolithic to historic periods are present, further widening the audience for the volume.

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, South Dakota. Examining this grassroots activism offers a new approach that uncovers the sophisticated ways Midwestern suffragists understood citizenship as obligation. By investigating civic responsibility, Egge reorients scholarship on woman suffrage and brings attention to the Midwest, a region overlooked by most historians of the movement. In doing so, she sheds new light onto the ways suffragists rejuvenated the cause in the twentieth century.

The cross is one of Christianity’s most distinctive symbols, increasingly cutting across Catholic/Protestant and other denominational divides. Although the US acknowledges no official religion, a variety of both Christian and non-Christian denominations have flourished. Crosses dot the landscape, sometimes towering over it and at other times simply marking a grave or the site of a traffic accident, or providing a place for contemplation. Courts continue to decide whether it is better to remove long-standing crosses on public property to protect the separation of church and state, or whether removing such symbols might be misinterpreted as expressing hostility towards religion. Whether marking identity, triumph, love, grief, or sacrifice, the cross remains important in American life and continues to be the subject of works of art, music, literature, and political, religious, and social rhetoric, all of which this volume addresses in an accessible A-to-Z format.

"The Plea starts with a terrible crime. On a moonlit night in 1889, the Iowa farmer John Elkins, and his young wife, Hattie, are brutally attacked and murdered in their bed. Eight days later, their son, eleven-year-old Wesley Elkins, is arrested and charged with the crime. The community is shocked by both the gruesome facts of the homicide and the age of the accused perpetrator, a small, quiet boy weighing just 75 pounds. The Plea tells the story of this crime and its aftermath. Despite his youth and evidence that he had been abused by his parents, Wesley is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in an adult prison. For more than a dozen years, the boy's fate is in the hands of others. His story captures the attention of a divided and transfixed public, raising questions about the criminal justice system and the rights of children. The focus of the narrative is on the legal and societal aspects of the case: Wesley's rehabilitation and remarkable transformation in prison, his plea that his case be reconsidered, the outpouring of support he received from prison wardens, politicians, newspaper editors, and educators. The story of the life of Wesley Elkins becomes an emotional and compelling story of redemption. This is a true story, based on years of meticulous research. All the scenes are based on primary sources: newspaper reports, legal documents, interviews, nonfiction works, memoirs, and personal letters. Bryan and Wolf quote from these materials throughout the book. The Plea is an accessible and fast-moving story that delivers a complete, complex, and nuanced narrative of this horrific crime, shedding light on the legal, social, and political environment of Iowa and the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s"--

Even though the Persian period has attracted a fair share of scholarly interest in recent years, as yet no concerted effort has been attempted to construct a comprehensive social history of Phoenician city-states as an integral part of the Achaemenid empire. This monograph explores the evidence from Persian-period literary (both ancient Jewish and classical), epigraphic, and numismatic sources, as well as material culture remains, in order to sketch just such a history. This study examines developments in Persian-period Phoenician city-states on the three levels: that of the individual household, the city-state, and the administrative unit of the Persian empire. These three societal levels are analyzed within the contexts of economic competition between and among the Phoenician city-states, their burgeoning economic ties with the outside world, and their interaction with the Persian imperial influence in the Levant.

Provides information on 68 important archaeological sites in Iowa, including sites of every type, from every time period, and in every part of the state.