Books in the Iowa and the Midwest Experience series

What is life about but the continuous posing of the questions: what happens next, and what do we make of it when it arrives? In these highly evocative personal essays, Douglas Bauer weaves together the stories of his own and his parents' lives, the meals they ate, the work and rewards and regrets that defined them, and the inevitable betrayal by their bodies as they aged.

The first book on the Jefferson highway, this covers its origin, history, and significance, as well as its eventual fading from most memories following the replacement of names by numbers on long-distance highways after 1926. In this study Lyell D. Henry Jr. contributes to the growing literature on the earliest days of road-building and long-distance motoring in the United States.

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.

Blends both the personal and the historical to complicate our understanding of the development of the Midwest, while also serving as a testament to the resilience of the Dakota and other indigenous peoples who have lived in this region from time immemorial.

Tracing the parallel lives of two women artists, Angel De Cora and Karen Thronson, at the turn of the twentieth century, art historian Elizabeth Sutton reveals how their stories intersected and diverged in the American Midwest.