Prairie City Iowa

Weary from the journalistic treadmill of "going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests" and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. Back in Prairie City, he helped on his father's farm, scooped grains at the Co-op, and tended bar at the Cardinal. The resultant memoir is a classic picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up and testing whether one can ever truly go home again. Bauer grew up "awkward with soil and with machines" in a small town east of Des Moines, As a teenager, he left the farm for college life twenty miles away and, after graduation, took a job with Better Homes and Gardens in Des Moines, writing in the junk-mail fictional persona of "Barbara Joyce,"asking millions of people to subscribe. After a few years he moved to Chicago to work as an editor and writer for Playboy and eventually as a freelance journalist. In the summer of 1975, he returned home to attend his grandmother's funeral and by autumn he moved back to Prairie City, where he stayed for the next three seasons. Bauer's book is neither a wistful nostalgia about returning to a simpler time and place nor a patronizing look at those who never leave the town in which they were born. What emerges is an unsentimental yet loving account of life in the Midwest. Not just a portrait of Prairie City, Iowa, but of everyone's small town, everywhere.

Prairie City is the social history of a representative midwestern town - a composite of several Oklahoma small towns. Beginning with the "one flashing moment" of the 1889 land run, which opened the "Oklahoma Lands" for white settlement, Angie Debo depicts the struggles of the settlers on the vast prairie to build a community despite seasons of drought, prairie fire, and destitution. Solidly based on historical research, Prairie City chronicles the arrival of the railroad, the growth of political parties and educational institutions, KKK uprisings, the oil boom, the Depression and the New Deal, and the effects of two world wars on small-town America.

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.

Contains the reports of state departments and officials for the preceding fiscal biennium.

"Focuses on a remarkable episode in the settling of the American Midwest, the formation in the 1880s of a colony of upper-class British immigrants who viewed Iowa pioneering as a way of perpetuating the Victorian gentleman's code. This social history examines the premises upon which the colony was built, follows its rise and fall, and portrays some of the lives of the resident gentlemen and ladies."--Book jacket.