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Author: Jim Heynen
Publisher: Bureau Oak Book
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 116
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Complementing Harker's photographs are vignettes by poet and writer Jim Heynen. Both whimsical and endearing, each vignette treats barns as organic and intelligent entities, reflecting the living history that can be found inside each rural structure."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Michael P. Harker
Publisher: Bureau Oak Books
Published: 2006-04
Total Pages: 30
ISBN-13: 9780877459774
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe result of a seven-and-a-half-year undertaking to document Iowa's barns and all they represent, Harker's Barns: Visions of an American Icon featured seventy-five stunning black-and-white photographs by Michael Harker. An impressive and well-received collection, the book helped preserve the glory of one of rural America's most elemental icons. Still Standing, a postcard book of thirty of Harker's barn photographs---some from Harker's Barns, some previously unseen---continues that mission of preservation. Printed on heavy card stock and perforated for easy removal, the cards showcase midwestern barns-from square to round, wood to brick, Dutch to Swedish, occupied or abandoned, all symbolizing a passing way of life that was once the lifeblood of Iowa and the Midwest. As barns continue to disappear, these images will endure. “Barns Again! Celebrating an American Icon,” an exhibit of Harker's barn photos (with text by Loren Horton) sponsored by Humanities Iowa and organized by the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Building Museum, with assistance from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is currently touring Iowa.
Author: Elmer Schwieder
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2009-04
Total Pages: 215
ISBN-13: 1587298481
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNow back in print with a new essay, this classic of Iowa history focuses on the Old Order Amish Mennonites, the state’s most distinctive religious minority. Sociologist Elmer Schwieder and historian Dorothy Schwieder began their research with the largest group of Old Order Amish in the state, the community near Kalona in Johnson and Washington counties, in April 1970; they extended their studies and friendships in later years to other Old Order settlements as well as the slightly less conservative Beachy Amish. A Peculiar People explores the origin and growth of the Old Order Amish in Iowa, their religious practices, economic organization, family life, the formation of new communities, and the vital issue of education. Included also are appendixes giving the 1967 “Act Relating to Compulsory School Attendance and Educational Standards”; a sample “Church Organization Financial Agreement,” demonstrating the group’s unusual but advantageous mutual financial system; and the 1632 Dortrecht Confession of Faith, whose eighteen articles cover all the basic religious tenets of the Old Order Amish. Thomas Morain’s new essay describes external and internal issues for the Iowa Amish from the 1970s to today. The growth of utopian Amish communities across the nation, changes in occupation (although The Amish Directory still lists buggy shop operators, wheelwrights, and one lone horse dentist), the current state of education and health care, and the conscious balance between modern and traditional ways are reflected in an essay that describes how the Old Order dedication to Gelassenheit—the yielding of self to the interests of the larger community—has served its members well into the twenty-first century.
Author: Carroll Engelhardt
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2012-08-15
Total Pages: 247
ISBN-13: 1609381351
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCarroll Engelhardt’s parents grew up in homes without electricity on farms without tractors and began farming in the same way. As a farm boy in northeastern Iowa, he thought that history happened only to important people in earlier times and more exotic places. After decades of teaching, he at last perceived that history happens to us all, and he began writing this book. Set within the thoughtfully presented contexts of the technological revolution in American agriculture, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the emerging culture of affluence, The Farm at Holstein Dip is both a loving coming-of-age memoir and an educational glimpse into rural and small-town life of the 1940s and 1950s. Engelhardt writes about growing up in a spacious farmhouse where life was centered in the kitchen and frugality dictated that every purchase be weighed carefully. His chores grew up with him: he fed chickens and gathered eggs at age six, rode a horse on the hayfork at nine or ten, milked cows by hand at eleven, and hired out to other farmers to load bales in the field and work in the haymow at fifteen. The simple pleasures and predictable routines of a Saturday night at the movies in nearby Elkader, Pioneer Days on the 4th of July, Confirmation Sunday, class picnics, and baseball and basketball games play out against a background of rural decline, alternating economic uncertainty and prosperity, and Cold War anxiety—next to polio, he most feared Communist subversion and atomic blasts. The values and contradictions imparted by this evolving mix of international, national, and local cultures shaped his coming of age. Engelhardt brings us into the world of his fourth-generation farm family, who lived by the family- and faith-based work ethic and concern for respectability they had inherited from their German and Norwegian ancestors. His writing has a particularly Iowa flavor, a style that needs no definition to those who live in the state. Readers will discover the appeal of his wry, humorous, and kind observations and appreciate his well-informed perspective on these transformative American decades.
Author: Marc Olden
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-11-27
Total Pages: 848
ISBN-13: 1504057155
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFollow a daring reporter in these four hard-boiled suspense mysteries from “a master of intrigue and adventure” (New York Times–bestselling author Clive Cussler). Meet Harker, an investigative reporter willing to do whatever it takes to break a story—even if it might break him first . . . The Harker File: A CIA agent knows the cause behind mysterious deaths in Wisconsin and Iowa—and their connection to Communist Russia. But getting the scoop means Harker will be the next to die . . . Dead and Paid For: A group of con men are preying on the families of US soldiers who are missing in action in Vietnam. Harker’s out to uncover the truth without going missing himself . . . They’ve Killed Anna: In this Edgar Award finalist, a vast government conspiracy is hiding the dangers of nuclear energy from the public. Harker’s source is about to help him break the story—when she suddenly dies. Now the journalist will need to watch his back . . . Kill the Reporter: Harker is helping a California senator search for his missing daughter—only to draw the ire of a religious cult hell-bent on silencing him.
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Published: 2005
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Michael P. Harker
Publisher:
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 100
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMichael Harker’s goal is to record Iowa’s historically significant architecture before it disappears forever. From Coon Center School no. 5 in Albert City to Pleasant Valley School in Kalona, North River School in Winterset to Douglas Center School in Sioux Rapids, and Iowa’s first school to Grant Wood’s first school, he has achieved this goal on a grand scale in Harker’s One-Room Schoolhouses.
Author: Erika Billerbeck
Publisher: Bureau Oak Book
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 1609387147
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Wildland Sentinel, Erika Billerbeck takes readers along for the ride as she and her colleagues sift through poaching investigations, chase down sex offenders in state parks, search for fugitives in wildlife areas, haul drunk boaters to jail, perform body recoveries, and face the chaos that comes with disaster response.
Author: Lawrence L. Rettig
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2013-10-15
Total Pages: 162
ISBN-13: 1609381904
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGardening in Iowa’s Amana Colonies is the culmination of techniques that stretch back several centuries to central Europe, when adherents to a new faith called the Community of True Inspiration formed their own self-reliant communities. As a child of parents who were part of the communal life of the Amana Society, Larry Rettig pays homage to the Amana gardening tradition and extends it into the twenty-first century. Each of the seven villages in Amana relied on the food prepared in its communal kitchens, and each kitchen depended on its communal garden for most of the dishes served (the kitchens in Rettig’s hometown produced more than four hundred gallons of sauerkraut in 1900). Rettig begins by describing the evolution of communal gardening in old Amana, focusing especially on planting, harvesting, and storing vegetables from asparagus to egg lettuce to turnips. With the passing of the old order in 1932, the number of the society’s large vegetable gardens and orchards dwindled, but Larry Rettig and his wife, Wilma, still grow some of the colonies’ heirloom varieties in their fourth-generation South Amana vegetable garden. In 1980 they founded a seed bank to preserve them for future generations. Rettig’s chapters on modern vegetable and flower gardening in today’s Amana Colonies showcase his Cottage-in-the-Meadow Gardens, now listed with the Smithsonian in its Archives of American Gardens. Old intermingles with new across his gardens: heirloom lettuce keeps company with the latest cucumber variety, a hundred-year-old rose arches over the newest daylilies and heucheras, and ancient grapevines intertwine with newly planted wisteria, all adding up to a rich array of colorful plantings. Rettig extends his gardening advice into the kitchen and workroom. He shares family recipes for any number of traditional dishes, including radish salad, dumpling soup, Amana pickled ham, apple bread, eleven-minute meat loaf, and strawberry rhubarb pie. Moving into the workroom, he shows us how to make hammered botanical prints, Della Robbia centerpieces, holiday wreaths, a gnome home, and a waterless fountain. Touring his gardens, with their historic and unusual plants, will make gardeners everywhere want to reproduce the groupings and varieties that surround Larry and Wilma Rettig’s 1900 red brick house.
