Looks at how Iowa women fared under the Works Projects Administration during the Great Depression. Describes WPA projects open to women in Iowa, and evaluates how the programs carried out the WPA's sometimes idealistic goals. An appendix analyzes the WPA's impact on individual women in one Iowa county. Includes bandw historical photos. Noun has written several books on Iowa women. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The state of Iowa is largely unappreciated and often misunderstood. It has a small population and sits in the middle of a huge country. It’s thought of as an uninspiring place full of farms and fields of corn. But Iowa represents America as surely as New York and California, and Iowa’s history is more dynamic, complicated, and influential than commonly imagined. Jeff Bremer’s A New History of Iowa offers the most comprehensive history of the Hawkeye State ever written, surveying Iowa from the last ice age through the COVID-19 pandemic. It tells a new and vibrant story, examining the state’s small-town culture, politics, social and economic development, and its many diverse inhabitants. Bremer features well-known individuals, such as Sauk leader Black Hawk, artist Grant Wood, botanist George Washington Carver, suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, and President Herbert Hoover. But Bremer broadens the state’s story by including new voices—among them, runaway enslaved men who joined Iowa’s 60th Colored Regiment in the Civil War, young female pearl button factory workers, Latino railroad workers who migrated to the state in the early twentieth century, and recent refugees from Southeast Asia and the Balkans. This new story of Iowa provides a brisk, readable narrative written for a broad audience, from high school and college students to teachers and scholars to general readers. It tells the story of ordinary and extraordinary people of all backgrounds and greatly improves our knowledge of a state whose history has been neglected. A New History of Iowa is for everyone who wants to learn about Iowa’s surprising, complex, and remarkable past.
Caring for America is the definitive history of care work and its surprisingly central role in the American labor movement and class politics from the New Deal to the present. Authors Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein create a narrative of the home care industry that interweaves four histories--the evolution of the modern American welfare state; the rise of the service sector-based labor movement; the persistence of race, class, and gender-based inequality; and the aging of the American population--and considers their impact on today's most dynamic social movements.
In this engrossing history of the Hawkeye State, Dorothy Schweider reveals a place of fascinating grassroots politics, economic troubles and triumphs, surprising cultural diversity, and unsung natural beauty. Above all, this is the history of the people of Iowa and the lives they have led—the accomplishments of both ordinary and not-so-ordinary Iowans.
A reissue of a 1939 guide to Kansas compiled as part of the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression years, providing information not only about the attractions of the state, but serving as a cultural chronicle of an earlier time.
Ten percent of book profits will go to the Susan Angeline Collins Scholarship at Upper Iowa University in Fayette, Iowa. Get ready to delve into a world of hardship, challenge, and fulfillment. Explore the life of African American Susan Angeline Collins and be inspired by her faith, pioneering attitude, missionary successes, unfailing courage, and belief in everyone’s right to an education. As Miss Collins’ life unfolds before you, relevant social issues affecting people of color are intertwined. Issues examined include economics, education, gender, race, religion, and Africa’s colonization from her 1851 birth in Illinois until her 1940 death in Iowa. Her resourcefulness in overcoming obstacles during her 33-year commitment to missionary service in the Congo Delta Region and Angola is compelling. Miss Collins’ story demonstrates the difference one person can make in the lives of an unknown number of women and children, some orphaned and homeless and others escaping early marriage and subservience. Her leadership is evidenced when starting a girls’ school in the northern Angolan high plateau region years before Mary Jane McLeod Bethune initiated her school for African-American girls in Florida. You will be gratified to discover how this diminutive bundle of energy achieved recognition as a stalwart missionary, leader, teacher, nurse, construction manager, and surrogate mother to “her girls.”
