Iowa and the Midwest Experience Book Series
We partnered with the University of Iowa Press in 2009 to create Iowa and the Midwest Experience, a book series devoted to publishing books on state and regional history. Such a move was critical; when Iowa State University Press was taken over by a commercial press, it dropped its line of Iowa history books, and Iowa no longer had a significant publisher dedicated to soliciting and publishing books about Iowa and Midwestern history. We have filled this void.
The series seeks to publish innovative books on the social, cultural, economic, political, and geographical issues that have shaped the history of Iowa and other Midwestern states. In addition to presenting current research and suggesting future directions for scholars, the series aims to make Midwestern history more accessible to the general public.
William Friedricks, director of the center, serves as series editor. Please send inquiries or manuscript proposals to him, bill.friedricks@simpson.edu, or consult the submission guidelines for authors at the University of Iowa Press website.
What Happens Next? Matters of Life and Death
"These are some of the finest, if not the finest, personal essays I have ever read. With exacting and exquisite prose, Douglas Bauer achieves the truly remarkable here: he plumbs the heart of his midwestern family with brave and naked fairness, rendering his own mortality with a steadfastly clear-eyed and life-loving attention to all that is essential, our shared human frailty and resilience and those tangled but lasting ties that bind. What Happens Next? Matters of Life and Death is a masterful, soul-nourishing work, and I simply cannot recommend it highly enough."
—Andre Dubus III, author, Townie: A Memoir
On Behalf of the Family Farm
“In this very readable book, Jenny Barker Devine shows that rural women who disdained feminism behaved like ‘agrarian feminists.’ Banding together to confront rapid and all-encompassing changes, women in Iowa in the decades after World War II navigated between the demands of a patriarchal society built around land, agriculture, and family and a strong sense of pride in themselves as mothers, wives, and women. This study will provoke more than its share of spirited conversation among Iowans as well as academics.”--Andrew Cayton, Miami University
*Will be available May 2013
Main Street Public Library
"Wiegand challenges conventional interpretations of the role of public libraries in the community as 'arsenals of a democratic culture,' asserting instead that libraries served as 'uniquely negotiated cultural centers' that reinforced social cohesion, values, and taste at the local level. Based on exhaustive research in primary sources, this study sets a high standard of scholarship. It is a significant contribution to the literature of the history of libraries."--Robert S. Martin, professor emeritus, School of Library and Information Studies, Texas Women's University
Iowa Past and Present
"In Iowa Past to Present, originally published in 1989, Dorothy Schwieder, Thomas Morain, and Lynn Nielsen combine their extensive knowledge of Iowa's history with years of experience addressing the educational needs of elementary and middle-school students. Their skillful and accessible narrative brings alive the people and events that populate Iowa's rich heritage. This revised edition brings the story into the twenty-first century and makes a paperback edition available for the first time." --University of Iowa Press
