The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America," by Matthew Roth

Steely, Rachel

Book Reviews and Notices      109 
web of interconnected organizations, agencies, councils, and politicians 
is balanced by attention to individual actors, and Foote also gives voice 
and life to some of the patients themselves via Schey’s recollections. The 
book suggests a need for other such state-level studies, particularly 
those that focus on the latter half of the twentieth century. Iowa also 
created a series of state institutions for the care of mentally ill patients 
through the latter half of the nineteenth century; as in Minnesota, the 
twentieth century brought critiques of conditions at these institutions 
to public attention even as treatment shifted from physical to pharma-
ceutical methods.  
 Foote provides a valuable history of grassroots organizing and a 
unique focus on a religious institution’s progressive political action. 
One lesson of this crusade is that social movements can fall prey to po-
litical and economic shifts; decades after these events, “the fundamental 
right to comprehensive mental health care in the United States still has 
not been achieved” (241). Nevertheless, the strategic alliances between 
individuals, churches, and mental health organizations provide a blue-
print for enacting social change that has, Foote points out, created the 
momentum that would eventually result in organizations such as the 
National Alliance on Mental Illness, state-level mental health initiatives, 
and mental health coverage in the 2010 Affordable Care Act. In an era 
of decidedly divisive politics, the vision of coalitions that amplify indi-
vidual voices to the level of policy change is compelling indeed.  
 
 
Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America, by Matthew Roth. Lawrence: Uni-
versity Press of Kansas, 2018. xi, 356 pp. Tables, graphs, illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Rachel Steely is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. 
She is working on a dissertation that maps the emergence and diffusion of soy 
as a global commodity. 
During its history as an American crop, the soybean has often been a 
disappointment. Promoters advocated soybean cultivation for agricul-
tural improvement schemes that were not widely implemented; inno-
vators misjudged soy as a viable meat, coffee, and milk substitute; and 
social reformers used soy as a key nutritional substrate in utopian com-
munities that ultimately fell apart. Despite numerous setbacks, soybean 
plants now occupy more acres of American farmland than any other 
crop. Matthew Roth’s Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is an in-
formative account of the introduction and spread of the soybean in the 
United States that explains how one of twentieth-century American ag-
riculture’s most persistent failures was also one of its greatest successes.  
110      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The narrative unfolds across nine chronological chapters that span 
the twentieth century, the period during which soy expanded from an 
obscure crop used primarily for animal fodder into a commodity pres-
ent in a dizzying array of products. Throughout, Roth foregrounds in-
dividuals, uncovering stories of immigrants, government agents, busi-
nessmen, and social visionaries who experimented with soybean plants, 
processing, and utilization. The first chapter follows people who moved 
soybean cultivars and foods from East Asia to the United States. It high-
lights the ingenuity of immigrants to the American West who retained 
soy as part of traditional foodways, the encounters of Seventh-day Ad-
ventist missionaries with soyfoods overseas, and the labor of U.S. De-
partment of Agriculture agronomists like Frank Meyer, Charles Piper, 
and William Morse. Subsequent chapters examine the slow, uneven 
spread of the soybean into American fields, factories, and foods. Early 
twentieth-century farm extension agents distributed seeds and infor-
mation to farmers. The world wars stimulated interest in soy as a high-
protein foodstuff and as a substitute for other fats and oils unavailable 
as a result of disruptions to wartime supply chains. George Washington 
Carver, Henry Ford, and proponents of the chemurgical movement 
sought in soy a solution to the farm problem and a way to forge new 
links between agriculture and industry.  
 As Roth notes, many such experiments failed to take root. Only 
with the takeoff of industrial meat production following World War II 
did soy became entrenched as a dominant agricultural commodity. This 
period saw what was arguably the most dramatic alteration that Amer-
ica made to the soybean: the installation of soy at the foundation of a 
new food system, both as a protein source in livestock feed and as an 
additive in an ever expanding cornucopia of processed foods. Yet these 
subjects receive relatively sparse treatment in later chapters of the book, 
which instead feature postwar proponents of soy milk, tofu, and tex-
turized vegetable protein, and discuss the cultural tastes that stymied 
broader adoption of these goods by American consumers. The book’s 
content does not match Roth’s stated objective: to examine how “Amer-
ica transformed the soybean.” The book consists, instead, of an interest-
ing but loosely linked set of vignettes that tend to bird-dog experiments 
with soy foods that did not catch on, in lieu of a deeper excavation of 
the most significant changes worked on, and through, the soybean. 
 Another missed opportunity to demonstrate soy’s historical sig-
nificance lies in the book’s lack of engagement with existing historical 
scholarship. Fresh perspectives could be found by examining familiar 
topics through the lens of soy, including the historical transformation 
of southern and midwestern agriculture, changes to food production 
Book Reviews and Notices      111 
methods and consumer habits, and the place of such phenomena within 
global patterns of trade and consumption. Some connections are sug-
gested, but few receive sustained analysis, leaving readers with an 
impression of American soy as a quirky sideshow, an impression anti-
thetical to soy’s pervasive reach across the countryside, into diets, and 
around the world.  
 Magic Bean succeeds on several levels. Most importantly, Roth pulls 
soy from obscurity and places it center stage. Historians have paid soy 
strikingly little heed, and this study does critical work in rectifying that 
oversight. To do so, Roth has admirably woven many different threads 
into a single piece, making space for discussion of technological inno-
vations, environmental concerns, commodity price fluctuations, federal 
and state soy promotional schemes, debates about GMOs and the 
nutritional value of soy, and biographical sketches of business leaders. 
Readers will enjoy Roth’s compelling presentation of his actors and the 
consistent inclusion of the variegated perspectives and hopes they 
brought to their work with soy. While consistent with Roth’s emphasis 
on consumption, among the voices that are less perceptible in Magic 
Bean are those of the farmers who took up soybean cultivation; there are 
surely important insights, experiences, and contributions to be found in 
their stories as well. Magic Bean is an enjoyable read, and anyone inter-
ested in the cultures, science, and economics of American foodways will 
find much of interest between its covers. 
 
 
Walking Home Ground: In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth, by 
Robert Root. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017. xv, 250 
pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $22.95 hardcover and paperback. 
Reviewer Thomas K. Dean is senior presidential writer/editor and adjunct 
assistant professor at the University of Iowa. His extensive writings about 
the importance of place include Under a Midland Sky (2008). 
A central question of what is sometimes called “place studies” is how 
one becomes as deeply connected to place as possible. Robert Root pro-
poses that physical connection is essential: thus his project of “walking 
home ground” as he seeks to become a more intentional resident of the 
Wisconsin landscape he has moved to. Root does not merely hike the 
trails of his local environment, however. He chooses to make a deeper 
connection by retracing the footsteps of three essential writers of this 
land—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth—literally walk-
ing the same ground those figures trod and opening his informed 


English

Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America

Review of: "Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints," edited by Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller

Cutter, Barbara

90      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
This book—the most recent compilation of edited primary source ma-
terial from Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame—contains annotated 
transcriptions of all newspaper dispatches written by New York re-
porter Henry Villard from Springfield, Illinois, from November 10, 1860, 
to February 11, 1861, reporting the activities of president-elect Abraham 
Lincoln for the New York Herald, Cincinnati Commercial, and San Fran-
cisco Bulletin. Villard’s reports document the scramble for patronage 
posts and cabinet appointments that consumed the time and attention 
of mid–nineteenth-century politicians and commentators. An appendix 
includes Villard’s reports on the 1858 Illinois senatorial contest between 
Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, wherein Villard’s pro-Douglas bias is 
evident in his disparaging observations regarding Lincoln and other 
Republicans. 
 Students of Iowa history will find that relative to office seekers from 
other states, Iowans were relatively modest in their badgering of the 
president-elect. Only two Iowa delegations are reported to have trav-
eled to Springfield, both in support of fellow Iowan Fitz Henry Warren, 
whose quest to become Postmaster General proved unsuccessful. Iowa 
Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood made an obligatory call on Lincoln, as 
did Lee County’s Hawkins Taylor, an old Lincoln friend and ally. Vil-
lard’s account of an Iowa office seeker too inept to impress his name in 
the memory of Lincoln and his associates illustrates his easterner’s con-
descending attitude toward midwestern people and culture. Scholars 
looking for evidence of a general sense of eastern regional superiority 
will find it in both the general tenor of Villard’s dispatches and in spe-
cific examples. 
 
 
Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints, edited by 
Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller. Kent, OH: Kent State University 
Press, 2018. xviii, 358 pp. Illustration, notes, index. $49.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Barbara Cutter is associate professor of history at the University 
of Northern Iowa. She is the author of Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The 
Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865 (2003). 
Historical scholarship on women and the American Civil War has pro-
liferated in the past 30 years. As Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller 
note, this scholarship has become increasingly diverse in recent years, 
expanding to focus on the experiences of Northern and Southern women, 
black and white, immigrant and native born, elite, middle class and 
working class, and rural and urban. Yet, as they point out, the scholar-
ship overall is still “regionally segregated.” “Historians writing about 
Southern women rarely comment on or interact with those working on 
Book Reviews and Notices      91 
the North, and vice versa” (xi). The editors’ goal with this collection, 
Women and the American Civil War, is to open up a conversation between 
scholars of Northern and Southern women to start the process of break-
ing down this regional divide. Specifically, they “pair” two essays—one 
on Northern women and the other on Southern women—in eight topic 
areas of the history of the Civil War era: politics, wartime mobilization, 
emancipation, wartime relief, women and families, religion, Recon-
struction, and Civil War memory. The essays themselves are largely 
synthetic accounts of the historical scholarship on a topic area. 
 While this book review cannot do justice to the arguments of 16 
authors on 8 topics, some examples may convey a sense of the volume. 
In the “politics” topic, for example, Elizabeth R. Varon’s essay, “South-
ern Women and Politics in the Civil War Era,” points out just how po-
litically active Southern women (both black and white, Union and Con-
federate) were during the Civil War era, and she suggests that scholars 
should “define politics broadly, to include not only electoral politics but 
a variety of battles for social authority” (19). Stacey M. Robertson’s piece, 
“ ‘All Ladies Have Politics’: Women, Morality and Politics in the North,” 
focuses on the important political roles played by Northern female abo-
litionists to make a similar point: “We need to broaden our understand-
ing of the ‘political’ to include activities and communications beyond 
traditional partisan boundaries” (35). In “Emancipation,” Rebecca Capo-
bianco, in “Southern Women and Emancipation during the Civil War,” 
suggests that scholars should expand their understanding of the mean-
ing of emancipation during the war. Instead of only focusing on en-
slaved people who left their masters, scholars could also explore the 
“ways in which black women sought to establish some measure of ‘free-
dom’ even as they remained enslaved” (95). Chandra Manning, in the 
paired piece, “Northern Women and Emancipation,” focuses on North-
ern women who went south to work with formerly enslaved people in 
an effort to “make emancipation real” (115). She suggests what made 
their experience different from other Northern women—which scholars 
have overlooked—was that they inevitably “came face to face with fail-
ure” (111). That is, the problems facing the formerly enslaved people 
were too large to be solved given prejudice and the resources allotted 
for the task. Acknowledging that failure, she argues, made Northern 
women (black and white) “more likely to see differences between freed 
people and themselves as sensible adaptations to learn from rather than 
defects” (113). She suggests that scholars should, first, more carefully 
distinguish between Northern women’s work with formerly enslaved 
people and other types of war work; and, second, pay attention to the 
transformative nature of emancipation work. 
92      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The overall importance of this collection lies in its effort to connect 
the experiences of women in Civil War America across the sectional di-
vide. In many cases, however, the paired essays make few such connec-
tions, so it is not clear how reading the essays together would facilitate 
scholars’ thinking across regional boundaries more than would reading 
existing scholarship on both regions. Many of the essays—especially 
in the topic areas of politics, wartime mobilization, wartime relief, and 
one of the emancipation essays—have substantial topical overlap. The 
separation of wartime mobilization and wartime relief was particularly 
puzzling: as the editors themselves note, the distinction between them 
“seems rather a fine one” (xiv). Combining existing topic areas could 
have also created space for additional topics in the collection, such as 
sexuality and masculinity. Nonetheless, having all these essays in a sin-
gle volume is a convenience. The book should be of interest to scholars 
and graduate students working on women in the Civil War era. Readers 
of the Annals of Iowa may be particularly interested in Nichole Etche-
son’s essay, “Women and Family at Home in the North,” because of her 
use of primary sources from Iowa and other midwestern states.  
 
 
Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil 
War, by Kristopher A. Teters. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 225 pp. Notes on methodology, 
notes, bibliography, index. $32.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Robert Wooster is Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M 
University–Corpus Christi. His books include American Military Frontiers: 
The U.S. Army in the West, 1783–1900 (2009) and The Civil War Bookshelf: 50 
Must-Read Books about the War Between the States (2001). 
Since the 1950s, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the at-
titudes and actions of the Union Army regarding the confiscation and 
emancipation of slaves. In this first study to focus exclusively on Union 
officers in the western theater, Kristopher A. Teters concludes that “prag-
matism, far more than morality, motivated western officers to support 
emancipation” (2). In so doing, Teters positions himself firmly in the 
camp of historians Bell Irvin Wiley, Louis Gerteis, Mark Grimsley, and 
Gary Gallagher, all of whom have said much the same thing. Thor-
oughly researched and entirely convincing, Practical Liberators surely 
establishes this interpretation as representing the consensus among 
professional historians. 
 As the author explains, most western officers initially insisted that 
they were fighting to save the Union, not to end slavery. Following the 


Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints

Review of: "Creating the Land of Lincoln: The History and Constitutions of Illinois, 1778-1870" by Frank Cicero Jr

Pettys, Todd E.

Book Reviews and Notices      419 
clarified lines of political authority, and “the flimsy frontier state began 
to gain traction” (157). Yet violence built through the 1780s as Virginia 
encouraged settlement in Kentucky and the Confederation Congress 
destabilized the region through policy and ineptitude. Harper con-
cludes his study with the new government under the Constitution us-
ing its fiscal powers to fund military campaigns that seemed to certify 
its control of the region. Neglected in the final chapter is the influence 
of state building in Canada because Harper treats the “composite British 
empire” as having “collapsed” in 1776 rather than continuing to evolve 
(176). 
 To be clear, there is not much successful state building in this book. 
Many westerners sought “the backing of an effective state,” but efforts 
to extend the power of states led to outcomes that “escaped the control” 
of state officials as westerners of all stripes “twisted official policies to 
serve their own ends” (127, 141, 146). The most successful state-building 
efforts seemingly came both with institutional developments that are 
not a part of this study and only briefly summarized (156–57) and after 
ratification of the Constitution, which is given perfunctory treatment 
in the closing pages of the final chapter. In some respects, this fits with 
Harper’s exploration of state building from below, how governments 
“cast a long shadow” even when they might appear to be “failed state[s]” 
(146, 178). But it’s a bit unsatisfying because it falls short of bridging the 
gap between state-building failures and successes. Notwithstanding this 
critique, Harper’s study is an admirable contribution to the historiog-
raphy of American expansionism and early state building in the Ohio 
valley. 
 
 
Creating the Land of Lincoln: The History and Constitutions of Illinois, 1778–
1870, by Frank Cicero Jr. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois 
Press, 2018. xv, 270 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 
$29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Todd E. Pettys holds the H. Blair and Joan V. White Chair in Civil 
Litigation at the University of Iowa College of Law. He is the author of The 
Iowa State Constitution (2018). 
Casting about for a new writing project, Frank Cicero Jr.—a partner at 
the Kirkland & Ellis law firm in Chicago—stumbled across a sentence 
in a century-old book about the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The sen-
tence noted that, when seeking admission to the Union in 1818, Illinois 
initially was slated to have a northern boundary falling far south of the 
future Chicago. With further investigation, Cicero learned that one man 
420      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
—Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois Territory’s delegate to Congress—single-
handedly persuaded the country’s political leaders to move the new 
state’s uppermost border much farther north. Those long-forgotten 
actions by Pope and a compliant Congress set the stage for Illinois to 
become a history-shaping, Lincoln-producing microcosm of the nation’s 
nineteenth-century tensions between North and South. Cicero was 
hooked, and Creating the Land of Lincoln is the result. 
 After devoting the first chapter to Pope and other prominent indi-
viduals and events in Illinois’s pre-statehood history, Cicero structures 
the book’s narrative around Illinois’s four nineteenth-century constitu-
tional conventions and the three ratified constitutions they produced. 
The formula works well, because those conventions—held in 1818, 
1847, 1862, and 1870—provided Illinois citizens with periodic opportu-
nities to assess their values, quarrel over their conflicts, and determine 
where compromise was and was not possible.  
 The conventions’ delegates sparred over a host of issues, ranging 
from gubernatorial vetoes to non-citizen immigrants’ right to vote. Just 
as in Iowa and many other states during that period, some of the most 
persistent conflicts came over issues of race. The Northwest Ordinance 
of 1787 had banned slavery in the region, but slavery culture managed 
to take root in Illinois nevertheless. One way it did so (as Cicero com-
pellingly explains) was through hereditary indentured servitude, a bru-
tally enforced system of trafficking in coerced human labor, profiting 
from servants’ offspring, and holding people to service for periods often 
reaching the full duration of their lives. As for free men and women of 
African descent, leaders in Illinois (like their counterparts in Iowa) de-
nied them the vote and other core civil rights and even tried to bar them 
from settling there. 
 In Illinois, as elsewhere, the tide would not begin to turn against 
explicitly racist laws of this sort until Illinois’s own Stephen Douglas pro-
voked a national backlash in 1854 by shepherding the Kansas-Nebraska 
Act through Congress. That legislation repealed the Missouri Compro-
mise of 1820 and gave settlers in vast swaths of territory the power to 
decide whether to permit slavery within their borders. It was the Kansas-
Nebraska Act that galvanized those who would establish the Republi-
can Party and that revived Abraham Lincoln’s own interest in politics, 
setting him on a course that would lead him through his historic de-
bates with Douglas and, later, to the nation’s presidency. 
 Cicero’s carefully researched and engagingly written book deserves 
attention from novices and scholars alike. The book should especially 
appeal to those interested in the nineteenth-century politics of race in 
the Midwest, the forces that placed Douglas and Lincoln on the nation’s 
Book Reviews and Notices      421 
political stage, and the early legal history of one of America’s most pop-
ulous states. For Iowans who know a bit about their own state’s past, 
reading Creating the Land of Lincoln is akin to touring a house that sits a 
block or two from your own: you become better sensitized to the hall-
marks of homes in your neighborhood and to the range of options that 
their builders believed they possessed. 
 One area in which Cicero might have done more to help readers 
draw interjurisdictional comparisons is in his treatment of financial in-
stitutions. When discussing the 1848 convention, he describes Illinois 
Democrats’ fierce opposition to banks. Their opposition is easier to 
fathom if one knows about the regional and national circumstances that 
helped provoke it. President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, successfully 
blocked congressional efforts to extend the charter of the Second Bank 
of the United States beyond 1836 even though the bank’s notes had pro-
vided the nation with a fairly reliable form of paper currency. After the 
bank closed its doors, state and private banks proliferated, flooding the 
market with notes—many of them worthless or of questionable value. 
In Iowa, Illinois, and other states, citizens heatedly debated whether 
banks brought them more evil than good.  
 When judged in light of what Cicero has put between his book’s 
covers, however, this is a mere quibble. Creating the Land of Lincoln is 
wonderfully rewarding. And who knows? Some of its sentences might 
inspire at least a few readers to launch new writing projects of their own. 
 
 
Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier, by James 
Schwoch. The History of Communication Series. Urbana and Cham-
paign: University of Illinois Press, 2018. ix, 248 pp. Maps, illustrations, 
graphs, notes, bibliographical references, index. $99.00 hardcover, 
$24.95 paperback, $22.46 ebook. 
Reviewer Roy Alden Atwood is Distinguished Professor and Vice Rector 
at Nehemiah Gateway University, Bucimas, Pogradec, Albania. He is the 
author of “Interlocking Newspapers and Telephone Directories in Iowa, 
1900–1917” (Annals of Iowa, 1984) and “Routes of Rural Discontent: Rural 
Free Delivery in Southeastern Iowa, 1899–1917” (Annals of Iowa, 1986). 
The ambiguous title of this ambitious history of the telegraph is inten-
tional. It traces across five densely packed chapters the interwoven 
threads that linked the new electrical communication technology to its 
natural and social environments on the western frontier and the politi-
cal, military, commercial, and cultural forces and fortunes that moti-
vated it through nineteenth-century North America.  


Creating the Land of Lincoln: The History and Constitutions of Illinois, 1778-1870

Review of: "How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted" byMadeline Uranec

Walsh, Matthew

450      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman 
They Adopted, by Madeline Uraneck. Madison: Wisconsin Historical 
Society Press, 2018. xi, 242 pp. Illustrations, appendix, bibliography. 
$22.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Matthew Walsh is professor of history at Des Moines Area Com-
munity College. He is the author of The Good Governor: Robert Ray and the 
Indochinese Refugees of Iowa (2017), which won the State Historical Society of 
Iowa’s Benjamin Shambaugh Award.  
Madeline Uraneck’s memoir focuses on her mutually beneficial rela-
tionship with a Tibetan American refugee family. While employed in 
Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, the author began an en-
during friendship with office cleaning woman Tenzin Kalsang. Uraneck 
served as a cultural guide for Tenzin, her husband Migmar, and their 
four children. At the same time, the newcomers guided Uraneck’s 
learning about Tibetan culture and her newly adopted family’s back-
ground. 
 In the 1950s, communist China exerted dominance over Tibet. 
Tibetans felt under siege as Chinese authorities repressed cultural tra-
ditions. During that tumult, Migmar escaped to India, where he even-
tually met his future wife, Tenzin, in a refugee camp. After winning a 
U.S. immigration lottery, Tenzin arrived in 1993, and her husband and 
children soon followed. 
 Uraneck’s book is valuable for addressing underexplored topics. 
Scholars of the Midwest are far more likely to write about farming than 
immigrants, particularly Asian Americans. Outsiders often see places 
like Iowa and Wisconsin as boring and homogenous farm states. Uni-
versity of Wisconsin representatives tried to combat this stereotype 
when they Photoshopped a black male onto a 2000 application brochure. 
Yet vibrant communities such as Wisconsin’s Tibetan and Iowa’s Tai 
Dam thrive in the Midwest. 
 When historians do study immigrants and refugees, they often ne-
glect children, whereas Uraneck focuses on this overlooked group. In 
Wisconsin the four Kalsang youngsters had to adjust to English lan-
guage classrooms with interactive learning as opposed to the lecture 
and memorization style they were accustomed to. Among the points of 
interest are the way the children learned to celebrate birthdays, dealt 
with Chinese Americans, contemplated total independence for Tibet, 
and picked their own spouse or married one of their parents’ choosing. 
 This is a fine introduction to Tibetan diasporic culture. Readers are 
walked through refugee neighborhoods in Wisconsin, India, and Nepal; 
learn the divide between those who yearn for complete independence 
for Tibet and those who want the Middle Way; and encounter the 49-
Book Reviews and Notices      451 
day Buddhist mourning ritual and traditional Tibetan wedding rites. 
Although written clearly, the book should have included a timeline to 
help readers with the sequence of important family events. Gender 
roles receive cursory attention. Did Migmar’s cleaning job carry greater 
stigma because it was seen as women’s work? Did Tenzin, who had 
been employed longer than her husband, earn more money? If so, did 
that create tension in the household? Also, immigrants and refugees 
often live in communities with African Americans as neighbors: What 
interactions did the family have with blacks? 
 Uraneck, a childless divorcée, filled a void through her relationship 
with this refugee family. “Welcoming these wayfarers,” she writes, “re-
kindles our humanity and heals our broken parts.” These words echo 
the sentiment of numerous Iowans during the Vietnam War era. As 
they supported Governor Robert Ray’s resettlement of refugees, many 
Iowans healed from the wounds of the Vietnam War. Uraneck demon-
strates that when we close the door on refugees, it is not only the refu-
gees who lose out. 
 
 
Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs, by Barry Phipps. Iowa 
City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. iv, 104 pp. 105 color photographs. 
$29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Drake Hokanson is an author, photographer, and independent 
scholar. He has written about and photographed Iowa extensively, including 
Reflecting a Prairie Town: A Year in Peterson (1994) and The Lincoln Highway: 
Main Street Across America (1988). 
Photographer Barry Phipps is a recent migrant to Iowa from Chicago. 
In his short years here he has brought us a crisp, colorful look at the 
wide reaches of the Hawkeye State. Phipps admits that he knew nothing 
about Iowa’s towns and landscape when he arrived. Between Gravity and 
What Cheer is his attempt to discover some essential visual facts about 
his adopted state. 
 Over four years he traveled border to border and shot hundreds of 
rolls of color film (yes, film). Phipps marked up his state map and headed 
to towns with interesting names (Diagonal, Gravity, What Cheer), even-
tually photographing in all 99 counties. Phipps draws on his training as 
a painter and responds to his subjects almost entirely visually—free of 
history, geography, or a sense of lives lived in a great open state. He 
was particularly drawn to small-town main streets, where he found old 
neon signs, red gas pumps, modern blue steel buildings, and a building 
front painted like the American flag, echoing Robert Frank’s The 
Americans. He brings us rural land as well—rivers, fields, wind turbines 


How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted

Review of: "Minnesota 1918: When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State" by Curt Brow

Nichols, Jeff

Book Reviews and Notices      437 
French citizens, and the soldiers’ attitudes about the war in general. A 
few letters also describe interactions with African American soldiers, 
reflecting the racial realities of the time. Of course, censorship and the 
fact that families allowed the papers to publish these letters meant that 
most do not give details about locations or the true horrors of World 
War I combat. Yet these letters do offer a glimpse into the mindset of 
the young men who volunteered for service in the American Expedi-
tionary Force.  
 Much of Meyer’s previous work has focused on the history of the 
rural Midwest, and this book is no exception. The soldiers discussed in 
Letters from the Boys hailed from three small towns in Green County, 
Wisconsin, which the author describes as “a quintessential Wisconsin 
rural dairy county” (5). The letters contained herein reflect that reality. 
By focusing solely on Green County, Meyer allows readers to take a step 
back into an early twentieth-century farming community. The soldiers 
often compared the sights on the Western Front to their home towns, 
and readers will appreciate the soldiers’ concerns for their family farms 
and the descriptions of French farms and the French countryside. 
 This book will be valuable for those interested in the rural Midwest 
or casual readers seeking insights into life on the Western Front. Readers 
more familiar with military history, or World War I historiography 
in general, will not find new analysis or new insights in this book. And 
because the author relies on letters reproduced in newspapers, it is not 
possible to follow a single narrative pertaining to American operations. 
Nonetheless, the book restores voices from the past, and anyone inter-
ested in the doughboy experience will connect to the young men in the 
book. Carrie Meyer ensures that their voices will endure for generations 
to come.  
 
 
Minnesota 1918: When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State, by Curt Brown. 
St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2018. 304 pp. Illustrations, 
maps, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Jeff Nichols is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of 
Illinois at Chicago. He wrote an undergraduate honors thesis at the Uni-
versity of Iowa on the 1918 influenza epidemic. 
Minnesota 1918 chronicles two often-forgotten catastrophes: the Spanish 
influenza epidemic and the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire, a conflagration 
that consumed 1,500 square miles across seven northeastern Minnesota 
counties. “Paint with numbers and the canvas turns unimaginably dark: 
nearly 1,500 Minnesota soldiers dying in combat in the World War I 
trenches of France; 453 fire victims; more than 10,000 deaths in the state 
438      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
linked to the 1918 influenza scourge,” writes Curt Brown, a Minneapolis 
Star-Tribune columnist (21). Throughout the year, the efforts to enforce 
loyalty threatened the foundation of democracy in the state. 
 The book does not attempt to be a comprehensive state history of 
the last year of the Great War. Only 3 of its 23 chapters are set south of 
the Twin Cities. (Iowa is fleetingly mentioned in an incident in which 
vigilantes “deported” Nonpartisan League sympathizers.) It is, of course, 
possible to give a compelling account of the Spanish influenza epidemic 
in Minnesota without supplying a county-by-county analysis. But the 
baffling organization of the book undermines Brown’s expressed desire 
to tell “human stories” behind the bleak statistics of 1918, as his narra-
tive restlessly flips back and forth from the fires to influenza to wartime 
politics without much concern for chronology.  
 However disjointed, the sections on the fires that swept through 
immigrant homesteads and mill towns on October 12, 1918, are the 
strongest parts of the book, as Brown complements the scholarship of 
Francis M. Carroll and Franklin R. Raiter’s The Fires of Autumn (1990) 
with newspapers, unpublished remembrances, and interviews with the 
descendants of survivors. While providing harrowing stories of fami-
lies attempting to survive the firestorm by hiding in wells and root cel-
lars, Brown takes care to explore the communities they had built before 
the war as well as the efforts of survivors to be compensated for a fire 
that was undoubtedly sparked by the federally administered railroads. 
Brown also deserves credit for examining the experiences of Native 
Americans, an underexamined subject within the historiography of the 
influenza epidemic.  
 Elsewhere, Brown’s research methods are more haphazard. Nothing 
good can come from using sources such as Wonderslist, a website that 
deliberates on the “Top 10 Most Beautiful Women in the World (2018)” 
and the “Top 10 Creepiest Ghost Towns You Wouldn’t Want to Visit,” 
as a means of contextualizing World War I. Suggesting that servicemen 
who lost their lives to influenza were not accorded the honor they de-
served, Brown reflects on Albert E. Betz, a German American carpenter 
from Sauk Center who died at Jefferson Barracks but whose name is 
missing from state memorials honoring the veterans of the American 
Expeditionary Force. Unable to uncover any substantive details of Betz’s 
military service, Brown maladroitly characterizes Betz as a “thirty-year-
old soldier wannabe” (15). If Brown had pulled from the Minnesota 
Historical Society Betz’s Gold Star Roll file a detailed form created by 
the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety to document the biog-
raphies of servicemen who had lost their lives in the war, he would have 
Book Reviews and Notices      439 
seen that Betz had spent much of his adult life in the Minnesota Na-
tional Guard. Betz’s 1917 draft registration notes that he had risen to the 
rank of corporal. He was discharged for degenerating vision in his left 
eye just as his regiment was being mobilized during the Mexican Expe-
dition. So, in the fall of 1918 Betz was not a volunteer “training to fight 
amid the trenches and mustard gas,” as Brown imagines. A draftee, 
Betz was assigned to limited military service, which would have placed 
him out of harm’s way. He died in the camp hospital two weeks after 
being inducted into the army. Instead of exploring the camps and battle-
fields men like Betz found themselves in, Brown moves on to other “for-
gotten victims” of 1918. As such, he never fully takes in the tragedy of 
that fatal year.  
 
 
Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s, by Felix Harcourt. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 253 pp. Illustrations, notes, 
bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Brent M. S. Campney is associate professor of history at the Uni-
versity of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of This Is Not Dixie: 
Racist Violence in Kansas 1861–1927 (2015). 
With several significant studies emerging over the past few years, the 
Ku Klux Klan in its various incarnations is experiencing a rebirth in 
the historiography. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt contributes sig-
nificantly to this trend with a fascinating and engaging examination of 
the Invisible Order in American popular culture in the 1920s. With his 
focus on cultural history, Harcourt has in many respects done for the 
Second Klan what Elaine Frantz Parsons did for the first in Ku-Klux 
(2016), her extraordinary cultural history of the terrorist group of the 
1860s. With sharp analysis and clear writing, Harcourt has substantially 
increased our understanding of racism and xenophobia in the 1920s and 
identified new directions for further inquiry. 
 Harcourt argues that previous studies of the Second Klan prioritize 
the issue of membership: how many official members did the group 
claim in the early 1920s, how precipitously did the membership decline 
after 1925, and how did Klan leaders attract recruits? Yet, as he dem-
onstrates, that focus minimizes the level of support the organization 
enjoyed among white Protestant Americans generally. “The Klan wielded 
broad cultural power that reached far beyond a paying membership,” 
he writes. “If we are to understand that power, the Invisible Empire 
must be understood not only as a social and fraternal organization, but 
also as a deeply rooted cultural movement” (6–7). Rising in a period of 


Minnesota 1918: When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 3 Summer 2018

Review of: "History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s" by M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowsk

Conard, Rebecca

Book Reviews and Notices       333 
 Yes, for many readers, popular histories such as The Floppy Show 
will evoke a great deal of nostalgia; but serious historians should not 
confuse nostalgia with frivolity. As American Studies scholar George 
Lipsitz observes, “The messages of popular culture circulate in a net-
work of production and reception that is quite serious. . . . A sideshow 
sometimes can be the main event.” Accordingly, Stein effectively illus-
trates why a long-running children’s cartoon show that featured a dog 
puppet should be considered a main event in Iowa history. 
 
 
History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, by 
M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska. Studies in United States Culture. Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xiii, 241 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Rebecca Conard is professor history emerita at Middle Tennessee 
State University, where she directed the public history program. She is the 
author of Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public His-
tory (2002). 
Iowa Living History Farms, which opened in 1970, and the World Food 
Conference of 1976, held at Iowa State University, were Iowa’s two na-
tionally recognized U.S. Bicentennial projects, but Iowans marked the 
nation’s 200th anniversary with hundreds of undertakings—from the 
restoration of Old Capitol in Iowa City and Terrace Hill in Des Moines 
to the 811 towns and cities recognized as Bicentennial Communities, the 
1,500 “Iowa Heritage in the American Revolution” study kits distrib-
uted to fifth-grade teachers, and the 5,000 farms that qualified for Cen-
tury Farm designation. Iowa led the nation with 2,800 recorded projects 
and events, 50 percent more than any other state. (See Iowa and the U.S. 
Bicentennial, 1776–1976: The Final Report [1976].) Iowa isn’t mentioned 
once in History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, 
but if you are curious about the larger context in which bicentennial 
celebrations—and protests—occurred, read this book.  
 The author, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, sees the bicentennial as a 
pivotal event in American cultural history. As she reads the 1970s, the 
bicentennial, as well as the decade itself, marked a transformation of 
historical consciousness among Americans. She argues that in the 1970s 
a “logic of preservation” gave way to a “logic of reenactment” as a way 
of making sense of the past (6–7). By this she means that history-based 
performative activities, such as living history, reenactment, and immer-
sive or interactive experiences at museums and historic sites, began to 
challenge the traditional mode of understanding the past through doc-
uments and other material evidence. The author’s premise concerning 
334      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
the “logic of preservation”—that it “relies on stable and uncontested 
material evidence” (6)—might be questionable, but she nonetheless 
weaves a convincing argument that “reenactive engagement with his-
tory emerged in the 1970s as a primary mode of historymaking” (167).  
 Rymsza-Pawlowska unpacks the complicated politics of the Amer-
ican Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), the initial federal 
planning body, and the American Revolution Bicentennial Administra-
tion (ARBA), which replaced it. She traces the shift from centralized 
planning wedded to the traditional metanarrative of Anglo-American 
history under the ARBC to a decentralized approach under the ARBA, 
which encouraged much greater citizen participation, with all the crea-
tivity and unpredictability that came with it. Not surprisingly, the author 
focuses more on the latter. For instance, she makes only passing reference 
in a lengthy list of patriotic projects promoted by the ARBC to the Amer-
ican Freedom Train, a traveling exhibition of Americana that included 
George Washington’s copy of the Constitution (59), but she devotes a 
whole chapter to a host of reenactment projects that sprang from state 
and local sources, such as reenactments of the LaSalle Expedition of 1681 
from Montreal to New Orleans and the 1776 Juan Bautista de Anza Ex-
pedition from Mexico City to San Francisco, and the Bicentennial Wagon 
Train, a year-long, multistate effort to retrace westward expansion in re-
verse from various points in the West to Valley Forge. She does not assert 
that reenactment events were new in the 1970s but, rather, that the 
“forms and purposes of reenactment [changed] considerably” (119).  
 The author’s examination extends to related shifts taking place in 
American culture. She notes the rise of history-themed prime-time televi-
sion shows such as The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie and the new 
miniseries genre popularized by Roots. She also points to the democratiz-
ing trend in historic preservation from upper-class groups focused on 
preserving revered architectural gems to community-based organiza-
tions increasingly interested in preserving buildings associated with or-
dinary people and historic districts that still held a certain feel of the past.  
 Much of Rymsza-Pawlowska’s attention, however, is trained on 
cultural politics. The People’s Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a pri-
vate organization that challenged the partisanship of the ARBC under 
the Nixon Administration and helped bring about its demise, also 
helped to put a finer point on social activism. In Boston, for example, 
the PBC as well as disabled veterans, Native Americans, and feminists 
repurposed the official commemoration of the 1773 Boston Tea Party by 
calling attention to the long history of inequality in American society. 
In a different vein, the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, an-
other private organization, and many black activists, including the 
Book Reviews and Notices       335 
Black Panther Party, sought to build on the earlier Black Arts movement 
by adding African American histories to the American narrative. The 
combined strength of bicentennial counterpoint movements led to the 
transformation of what the author calls “the American archive” of sto-
ries, events, and personalities associated with American identity (139ff). 
The full scope of inquiry in this book is difficult to capture in a brief 
review; suffice to say that Rymsza-Pawlowska’s analysis of American 
popular culture in the 1970s in relation to the U.S. Bicentennial helps 
explain why the culture wars, which began in the 1970s, have gradually 
become the new normal.  


History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s

Review of: "The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire" by Lyn Ellen Bennet

Franklin, Wayne

318      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
MacFadyen’s “Flax on the Northern Great Plains and Prairies, 1889–
1930,” Tisa M. Anders and Rosa Elia Cobos’s “The Beatabeleras of West-
ern Nebraska: Gender Labor, and the Beet Sugar Industry,” Jason 
McCollom’s, “ ‘We Are Tied Together . . . in a Hundred Different Ways’: 
Farmers and Farm Organizations across the Forty-Ninth Parallel, 1905–
1915,” Thomas D. Isern and Suzzanne Kelley’s “ ‘Done for Another 
Year’: The Resilience of Canadian Custom Harvesters on the North 
American Plains,” along with a passing nod to the region in Sterling 
Evans’s “Dependent Harvests: Grain Production on the American and 
Canadian Plains and the Double Dependency with Mexico, 1880–1950.” 
The authors of the previously published essays apparently did not have 
the opportunity to update their secondary sources. 
 Overall, Evans has provided a useful collection of essays that deal 
with the agricultural history of the North American West in a trans-
national context. Scholars will find it a ready reference and a good in-
troduction to specific topics. Most of the essays are synthesized based 
on secondary sources. Evans’s call for primary research is justified for 
this expansive, new approach to the agricultural history of the North 
American West. Anyone interested in this field of historical inquiry will 
find Evans’s essay collection a useful read and an important guide for 
future research.  
 
 
The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire, by Lyn Ellen 
Bennett and Scott Abbott. Connecting the Great West Series. College 
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017. xxiv, 269 pp. Illustrations, 
graph, notes, bibliography, index. $42.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Wayne Franklin is professor of English, American Studies, and 
Environmental Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. In addition 
to publishing several books on James Fenimore Cooper, he is the author of 
A Rural Carpenter’s World: The Craft in a Nineteenth-Century New York Town-
ship (1990). 
At the start of the 1962 film Lonely Are the Brave, modern cowboy Jack 
Burns encounters a barbed wire fence while riding his horse, Whiskey, 
across the New Mexico landscape. Dismounting, Burns (played by Kirk 
Douglas) snips the wire, opening the closed range and allowing him to 
proceed. The film, directed by David Miller from a script written by the 
once blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, was based on the second novel (The 
Lonely Cowboy, 1957) by a rising star of western literature, Edward 
Abbey. Here is how Abbey himself set up the fence-cutting episode: 
“[Burns] came eventually to a barbed-wire fence, gleaming new wire 
stretched with vibrant tautness between steel stakes driven into the 
Book Reviews and Notices       319 
sand and rock, reinforced between stakes with wire staves. The man 
looked for a gate but could see only the fence itself extended north and 
south to a pair of vanishing points, an unbroken thin stiff line of 
geometric exactitude scored with a bizarre, mechanical precision over 
the face of the rolling earth.” This fence is no ordinary obstacle. In a 
story that will end with the displaced cowboy run down on a rainy 
highway by a truck laden with toilet fixtures, the fence represents both 
the insistent demarcations of a modern, bounded world and the near 
ubiquity of industrial products that promise convenience but are 
capable of delivering confinement and at last death. 
 The Perfect Fence is a smart study of the tangles of meaning caught 
in the barbed wire fence. Fences had long been a staple of rural 
landscapes in North America when the first weaponized wire fences 
came onto the market following the Civil War. Fences kept animals out 
of crops during open range periods in American history, then kept them 
in once most of the range was closed. The first fences tended to be 
improvised from uprooted stumps and lopped-off tree branches. Then 
they were built in various forms from posts and boards. In areas of 
abundant stone outcroppings, as along much of the East Coast, rocks 
brought to the surface by continuing tillage eventually provided a more 
durable substitute, resulting in the distinctive stone walls of New 
England, New York, and even the Kentucky Bluegrass. Once European 
settlement passed from the area of heavy forest and geological riches 
and onto the prairie, where neither extensive woodlands nor much 
surface rock appeared, erecting enclosures became a challenge.  
 Into the gap came, eventually, an array of alternatives. Some use 
was made of hedging plants, most notably the Osage Orange, of which 
remnant examples survive to this day in several midwestern areas. 
Woven wire fence was tried, first of iron and later steel, but proved 
ineffective with regard to larger animals, which could simply push 
through it. In the 1870s various inventors affixed to wire fencing an 
array of sharp pronged attachments intended to repel any stock that 
came in contact. Although these innovations had considerable effect, 
they also generated various kinds of concern. It is in regard to this 
particular subject that the work of Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott 
is particularly valuable. Earlier scholars, including Earl W. Hayter and 
Henry and Frances McCallum chronicled various technical aspects of 
the story of barbed wire. Bennett and Abbott, after briefly treating that 
subject, pass on to a consideration of the rich and diverse cultural 
meanings of barbed wire fencing. Following the lead of other re-
searchers, they reflect on the inherent violence of the invention, which, 
after all, uses bodily pain as a means, as one 1885 comment had it, of 
320      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
keeping “the ‘ins’ from being ‘outs’” and “the ‘outs’ from being ‘ins.’” 
Because as early as the Spanish American War and the Second Boer War 
barbed wire was applied to the battlefield, the technology of pain as a 
deterrent to movement across boundaries soon became a subject of 
much reflection in a variety of practical and moral contexts. Worse 
applications of the agricultural invention to human or, rather, inhuman 
purposes followed in the twentieth century, from the trenches of World 
War I to the concentration camps of World War II.  
 The authors do a great job of illustrating the many strands of this 
story with appropriately chosen graphic materials and, in an especially 
fresh fifth chapter, modern American literary texts, including Abbey’s 
novel and the writings of Wyoming poet and prose writer and rancher 
James Galvin. This is, all in all, a nice example of how much we can 
learn from material culture studies undertaken in a spirit of genuine 
interdisciplinary inquiry. 
  
  
Birth of the American Dream: Four Immigrant Families, Nine Generations, 
The Middle-Class Struggle, by Steven C. Hull. Yorba Linda, CA: Rock 
Bluff Press, 2017. xx, 428 pp. Appendixes, notes. $14.99 paperback, $5.99 
Kindle edition. 
Reviewer Bruce Curtis, a native of Wapello County, Iowa, is Professor 
Emeritus of Michigan State University. He is the author of Like Ordinary Peo-
ple: An Illustrated Iowa Social Biography of Josephine Mae Teeter Curtis and Her 
Times, 1903–2007 (2008) and articles in the Iowa History Journal and Our Iowa. 
There is gold here, for those who choose to dig, nuggets to be found. In 
the front matter of this self-published work, Steven C. Hull remarks, “I 
did not write an academic history. This book is a compilation of biog-
raphy, history and memoir.” In explicating the book’s subtitle, Hull fo-
cuses on his English and Polish ancestors’ origins and how they made 
their way to America, ultimately to southeastern Iowa, some to Jeffer-
son County, but particularly to Wapello County, more particularly to 
Ottumwa and vicinity. 
 As the subtitle suggests, Hull views his ancestors as having en-
gaged for generations, whether in Europe or America, in a struggle to 
rise and cling to “middle class” status. Although the term is not defined, 
their struggle is presented as involving enduring and generally unsuc-
cessful attempts to become landowners in an era of booming popula-
tion growth, rising prices for increasingly limited land, and agricultural 
markets over which they had no control. In specific instances, as 
strapped tenant farmers, they turned to low-paying and insecure em-
ployment in the area’s new industries. 


The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire

Review of: "Locale and Universe: The Shared Story of the Heartland's Lucas County, Iowa, and the American Nation, 1846-2012," by Franklin D. Mitchell

Porter, Kimberly K.

192      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
here; sometimes, as in excerpted work by Robin Wall Kimmerer, several 
strands come together in one piece.  
 The book is valuable simply for the lovely writing and illustrations 
it has gathered. But it is also testimony to impressive erudition and the 
result of a bold vision. Other editors would have sorted differently, 
would have perhaps made more clear why “Ancient Peoples” has so 
much writing by recent European settlers, but it’s a good discussion to 
have and exemplary of how other place-based writers might want to 
think about the layering in their landscapes. 
 
 
Locale and Universe: The Shared Story of the Heartland’s Lucas County, 
Iowa, and the American Nation, 1846–2012, by Franklin D. Mitchell. Self-
published, 2016. 480 pp. Maps, illustrations, table, notes, bibliograph-
ical essay. $32.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Kimberly K. Porter, a native of Poweshiek County, Iowa, is pro-
fessor of history at the University of North Dakota. Her work has focused 
on local, rural, and agricultural history and oral history. She is working 
on a biography of Iowan Henry Field. 
Self-published books are often poorly received: the editing is usually 
poor, the argument flimsy, the purpose vague. . . . That can be said of 
some works I’ve been called upon to review or have stumbled upon in 
research endeavors, but it’s not entirely true of Franklin D. Mitchell’s 
history of Lucas County, Iowa. 
 Mitchell, emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern 
California, is trained in the ways of academic research and writing, 
which shows throughout the text. He has also published previously, 
most notably Harry S. Truman and the News Media: Contentious Relations 
and Belated Respect (1998). 
  Mitchell’s goal in undertaking Locale and Universe is unstated at 
the onset, but as his work comes to a close, he records his purpose, 
using the third person: “A historian, native of the county but a non-
resident for many years, became a resident once again in the new cen-
tury’s first decade to take the retrospective measure of a people and a 
place in time. He recalled in his mind the county’s unsung citizens and 
its illustrious sons and daughters. They were the pioneers who settled 
the land and established homes, schools, churches, farms, trades, and 
professions, followed by railroad workers, coal miners and men and 
workers in numerous varied enterprises and callings” (464). Some of 
the county’s residents had been “gentle and wise and a few mean and 
cruel,” but “the historian” felt the need to tell their tale, relating it to 
the American experience as a whole. 
Book Reviews and Notices      193 
 Accordingly, readers are treated to snippets regarding the area’s 
native population, the arrival of the first European-American settlers, 
the coming of the railroad, and the heinous activities of assorted crim-
inals that have remained a subject of conversation over the decades. 
Of greater significance to Mitchell’s effort to connect Lucas County to 
the national experience is his valuable discussion of the coal mining 
communities that once dotted the region. John L. Lewis, perhaps the 
most famous miner to come from the county, provides an interesting 
segue into union activities in the early twentieth-century coalfields.  
  Chapters detailing life in the late twentieth century and the early 
years of the twenty-first do not receive as much attention as more dis-
tant decades. Of merit, however, is the examination of two Lucas 
County companies that gained national attention: Johnson Machine 
Works and the Hy-Vee supermarket chain. The changing face of agri-
culture also makes a worthy appearance. 
 A few problems do appear. The vast majority of the research for 
Locale and Universe comes from secondary sources, community wits, 
and local newspapers. Even those are cited rather enigmatically as a 
“source” or a “conversation.” More serious are the factual errors that 
occasionally arise. James B. Weaver did not run as the Republican 
candidate for president in 1880; he did run as a member of the Green-
back Party. Mitchell’s assertion that, for the Amish, “genetics determine 
which men wear beards that rim their jaw and leave the rest of their 
pinkish face smooth and free of hair while others have full beards” 
(411) is decidedly in error. 
 Such issues should make readers wary of the “facts” Mitchell pro-
vides. However, for those interested in a rather simple tale of one 
county as an exemplar of the nation, the text should suffice, especially 
if they happen to be from southern Iowa.  
 
 
Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois, 
by James Krohe Jr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. 
xii, 346 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, index. $29.50 paperback. 
Reviewer James A. Edstrom is professor of library services and history at 
William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. A scholar of local and 
Illinois history, he has written a history of Illinois’s admission to the Un-
ion in 1818 that is under consideration for publication. 
Researching and writing the history of even well-defined geographic 
entities is no simple matter. Boundaries of cities, villages, townships, 
and counties evolve over time and in the process exert a profound in-
fluence over the histories of those political jurisdictions. The central 


Locale and Universe: The Shared Story of the Heartland's Lucas County, Iowa, and the American Nation, 1846-2012

Review of "Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: A Guide to Lincoln's Eighth Judicial Circuit" by Guy C. Frake

Lupton, John A.

Book Reviews and Notices      199 
Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: A Guide to Lincoln’s Eighth Judicial Circuit, by 
Guy C. Fraker. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. xiii, 130 
pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, bibliography, index. $21.95 paperback. 
Reviewer John A. Lupton is the executive director of the Illinois Supreme 
Court Historic Preservation Commission. He was formerly an assistant 
editor on The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and has written extensively 
about Lincoln as a lawyer. 
Guy Fraker’s new book is the third in a series that offers guided tours of 
Lincoln sites in Illinois. Specifically, Fraker leads us around central Illi-
nois on the Eighth Judicial Circuit during the height of Lincoln’s circuit-
riding practice. The guide provides valuable information about high-
ways, roads, and streets, including a key to different types of markers 
and wayside exhibits. Many illustrations show readers the people and 
places Lincoln experienced. Fraker demonstrates that Lincoln’s time on 
the circuit served two important purposes: building a substantial law 
practice while also creating a network of political operatives.  
 Fraker does not delve into scholarly issues related to Lincoln’s law 
practice, but this book is not meant for that. The purpose is to hold 
the reader’s hand while Fraker points out many Lincoln sites in a very 
well-done driving and walking tour of Lincoln’s circuit law practice. 
The book provides tidbits about some of Lincoln’s cases and personal 
interactions—not enough to know full details, but enough to whet the 
appetite. As a result, a larger “For Further Reading” section would 
have been helpful to direct readers to some of those cases. Surprisingly 
absent were the two Papers of Abraham Lincoln publications on 
Lincoln’s law practice. The four-volume book edition, particularly, has 
two in-depth tours of Lincoln’s circuit. Minor quibbles aside, Fraker 
succeeds in giving readers a taste of what life was like on the circuit 
with Lincoln, whose practice mirrored that of many attorneys in the 
Midwest. 
 
 
Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom, 
by Graham A. Peck. Urbana, Champaign, and Chicago: University of 
Illinois Press, 2017. ix, 264 pp. Maps, appendix, notes, index. $34.95 
hardcover. 
Reviewer Stephen Hansen is emeritus dean and professor of history at 
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is the author of The Making 
of the Third Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850–1876 (1980). 
In this study of the rise of antislavery politics, Graham A. Peck uses 
Illinois as the context for examining the political conflict over slavery 
from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to the election of Abraham 


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