The Annals of Iowa

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 2 Spring 2018

Clemmons, Linda M.

English

“The young folks [want] to go in and see the Indians”:
Davenport Citizens, Protestant Missionaries,
and Dakota Prisoners of War, 1863–1866

Index to v. 77 and Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 4 Fall 2018

Review of: "The Mistaken History of the Korean War: What We Got Wrong Then and Now" Paul M. Edward

McNeese, Allison

442      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The photos are high in quality, and the documentation for the indi-
vidual barns is impressive. In many cases the author was able to deter-
mine not only the ownership history but also how the barns were used 
and how their uses changed over time. For example, she notes specifi-
cally how the Ink barn interior (Linn County) was organized and even 
which doors horses and cattle used. She includes colorful details that 
enliven the work: a local newspaper notice that helpers at an 1892 barn 
raising were afterward treated to cigars and lemonade; a story of how 
a German immigrant came to Iowa because he had heard of topsoil 15 
feet deep.  
 Although the author takes care to relate each barn to agricultural 
activities on its individual farm, there is only the most general sense of 
how these barns collectively might represent any larger patterns in 
Iowa’s agricultural past, whether regional or temporal. The approach is 
more that of a collector than an analyst. We don’t learn, for instance, 
how the different barns might relate to the changes Alan Bogue de-
scribed long ago in his classic From Prairie to Corn Belt, or indeed to work 
by Deborah Fink (Open Country Iowa) or Sonya Salamon (Prairie Patri-
mony). Iowa Barns can complement but not replace works such as Allen 
Noble and Hubert Wilhelm’s Barns of the Midwest that do provide that 
broader interpretive context.  
 Iowa Barns is a worthy addition to a genre that will help to docu-
ment and promote evidence of a rapidly disappearing agricultural past. 
 
 
The Mistaken History of the Korean War: What We Got Wrong Then and Now, 
by Paul M. Edwards. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2018. xi, 186 
pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Allison McNeese is assistant professor of history at Mount Mercy 
University. Her academic interests include colonial American history, 
twentieth-century American history, Latin American history, and the his-
tory of Iowa, with special emphasis on race and gender issues. 
Some 70,000 Iowans, or close to 3 percent of the state’s population in 1950, 
served in the Korean War. Of those, 528 died in the conflict, and nearly 
half of those who served were still living as of 2012, according to the 
Iowa National Guard. A monument honoring Iowa’s veterans of the 
Korean conflict was dedicated in 1989, and recently survivors have been 
recognized by the opening of new museum exhibits (such as in Water-
loo) and the awarding of long-postponed medals.  
 Although the Korean conflict is often referred to as the “Forgotten 
War” in American culture, a sizable number of memoirs, histories, and 
Book Reviews and Notices      443 
reference works on Korea have been published in the past several dec-
ades. Paul Edwards, a noted historian of the Korean War and a veteran 
of it, is a prominent contributor to that literature. His most recent work 
is critical of the lack of knowledge about Korea in the United States. He 
calls attention to military and political disingenuousness, apathy among 
the American populace, media distortions over the decades (including 
those in newspapers, periodicals, literature, radio, television, and films), 
as well as the poor quality of public education. 
 The book challenges what the author sees as myths about Korea. 
Edwards purports to rely on veterans’ memoirs and newly released 
material from archives (such as Russia’s) to correct the record. He 
includes valuable material about the phenomenon of Post-Traumatic 
Stress Disorder among those who fought in Korea, and he offers a sig-
nificant reinterpretation of assumptions about what caused the war and 
what happened during it. Although the autobiographical material 
included in the work is refreshing, the new “evidence” the author touts 
is either not cited directly or is referred to in the most general terms.  
 The book has a number of flaws. It seems carelessly edited; there 
are a significant number of grammatical and spelling mistakes, as well 
as rather glaring factual errors. Among the latter: the dating of the cre-
ation of the CIA in 1946 (it was 1947); the victory of the Communist 
Party in China in 1948 (it was 1949); and the dissolution of the Soviet 
Union in December 1999 (it was 1991). The organization of material is 
also sometimes confusing. One example is the author’s reference to a 
“Dr. Cummings” early in the work; no full name or context is given, 
and no such person is included in the bibliography or index. Later a 
“Bruce Cumings” is mentioned in the narrative (and in the appendixes). 
There is also discussion of President Truman’s redeployment of U.S. air 
troops in Asia in 1948, apparently due to the Berlin blockade, “although 
the war [was] being fought in Korea” (33). (Of course, the Korean War 
did not begin until 1950.) Other oddities in the text: the inclusion of 
“Russia” with three other communist countries under the sway of 
“Moscow, the mother” of ideology (23); a short chapter titled “The 
Shock of No Gun Ri” that has barely one brief mention of that military 
event in its first paragraph—with nothing at all about it in the chapter 
afterward; and mention of various statements about Korea by promi-
nent Americans (Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and writer James 
Fallows among them) with no context or citations. One final note about 
textual inaccuracies: In his discussion of the Korean conflict’s place in 
the overarching “Cold War,” Edwards informs his readers that The Chi-
cago Manual of Style has recently ruled that the term should no longer be 
capitalized, as it is “not an event of significant identity or consequence.” 
444      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
(He notes that it was a decision made “by English majors rather than 
historians” [154].) That seemed exceedingly odd, so I checked the most 
recent edition of the manual, and the assertion appears to be entirely 
untrue. It seems fair to argue that the sheer number of a variety of errors 
in the work unfortunately affects the author’s credibility overall.  
 Still, Edwards focuses on a number of issues regarding the Korean 
peninsula currently in the spotlight in 2018. Although he writes that 
“the harshness of positions on both sides of the DMZ shows little signs 
of letting up” (141), there seems to be more realistic hope now that hos- 
tilities in the region are declining and that peace may finally be within 
reach. Edwards cites the Department of Veterans Affairs’ assertion that 
approximately one thousand Korean veterans are now dying every day, 
and he is certainly correct in saying, “For the sake of our nation’s soul, 
we need to remember and acknowledge the memory of those who 
fought in it” (164). 
 
 
The Story of Act 31: How Native History Came to Wisconsin Classrooms, by 
J P Leary. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018. xiii, 337 pp. 
Notes, index. $28.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Patricia Stovey is assistant professor of history at the University 
of Wisconsin–La Crosse. Her research and teaching focus on the relation-
ship of education to culture, race, and power. 
In The Story of Act 31, J P Leary challenges what he calls the “simplistic” 
view that the 1989 law was a reaction to Wisconsin’s spearfishing con-
troversy. Instead, what Leary’s work aims to demonstrate is that the law, 
which requires teacher training and classroom instruction in the “his-
tory, culture and tribal sovereignty of the federally recognized Ameri-
can Indian tribes,” was a result of national and state policy changes and 
ongoing efforts by Native American leaders and educators throughout 
the twentieth century (252). To make his argument, Leary blends his-
torical and policy analysis at the state and national level with reviews 
of Wisconsin public school texts and curriculum.  
 The book is divided into five parts. The first reviews American 
Indian sovereignty as defined in the U.S. Constitution and demonstrated 
through negotiations and treaties. In 1837, 1842, and 1854 treaties, the 
American government took control of Ojibwe land but never their 
hunting and gathering rights. After statehood, Wisconsin’s govern-
ment abrogated Ojibwe rights, in part because they competed with the 
state’s rising tourist economy. In the early 1970s Lac Courte Oreilles 
hunters Mike and Fred Tribble contested state law and set off a legal 


The Mistaken History of the Korean War: What We Got Wrong Then and Now

Review of: "Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteetn-Century America" by Shari Rabi

Diner, Hasia R.

308      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
and cutoffs, photographs and illustrations, a lengthy bibliography, and 
explanatory introductions and footnotes. It is an impressive effort and, 
like the earlier volumes produced in this series, an important addition 
to trail studies.  
 
  
Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America, 
by Shari Rabin. North American Religions Series. New York: New York 
University Press, 2017. viii, 193 pp. Notes, index. $37.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Hasia R. Diner is professor of history and of Hebrew and Judaic 
Studies at New York University (NYU), and she directs NYU’s Center for 
American Jewish History. Her books include The Jews of the United States, 
1654 to 2000 (2006) and Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in 
America from Colonial Times to the Present (2002). 
In this compact but geographically far-ranging book Shari Rabin set out 
to accomplish three scholarly ends, all of which expand understanding 
of American and American Jewish history. Jews on the Frontier, a straight-
forward title, looks at the experiences of the Jews who immigrated to 
the United States in the nineteenth century, during the decades flanking 
the Civil War, and who spread out beyond the Appalachian Mountains, 
crossed the Mississippi River, and penetrated in all directions, going to 
nearly every state and territory in the lands that opened up for the 
United States during its continental conquest. Most arrived as young 
men who took up the occupation of on-the-road peddlers and then 
graduated from peddling to entrepreneurship. Most did reasonably 
well economically, while a few succeeded spectacularly. As white men, 
they encountered no legal obstacles as they scouted out the most attrac-
tive places for business in this vast terrain.  
 Rabin’s goals grew out of this historical reality about Jewish migra-
tion and mobility. In the places they went, they found no laws limiting 
them and no pre-existing Jewish institutional infrastructure. They came 
to these places as the first Jews, and whatever they might want of a Jew-
ish life they had to do for themselves. 
 As a book of religious history, Jews on the Frontier considers religion 
not as a normative matter. Rather it places it in the realm of lived expe-
rience. Religion, Rabin shows as she charts physical movement and its 
impact on European immigrant Jews in the five decades from the 1820s 
to the 1870s, functioned as something they lived with. They did so by 
choice and not because they had to. How they engaged with religion 
did not rest exclusively with the dictates of rabbis or with the inherited 
laws of the past. Not that clergy did not show up on the frontier or that 
Book Reviews and Notices       309 
Jews did not build synagogues there. Those, however, came later. In-
stead, their religious lives reflected the needs and sensibilities of quite 
ordinary Jews, who performed their Jewishness as they felt they had to 
and as they wanted. The decisions these Jews made about the nature of 
their religious lives ought to be seen as creative, improvisational, and at 
times inconsistent, reflecting the immigrating Jews’ freedom of move-
ment in pursuit of economic opportunity.  
 Rabin hoped with this book to show how those decisions repre-
sented much more than a project to imitate the forms and styles of the 
dominant Protestant culture. Many previous historians have asserted 
that Jewish immigrants to America, particularly those who came from 
Central Europe during the nineteenth century and who ventured out 
beyond New York, substituted the trappings of Protestantism for Jewish 
authenticity. Rabin shows convincingly, instead, that the choices made 
by the Jews who found themselves in the thousands of small towns 
sprinkled across the American frontier thought long and hard about how 
to be Jewish in these seemingly unlikely places. As they settled down, 
they, as they could, founded organizations, hired rabbis and teachers, 
dispensed charity, sought out the services of kosher slaughterers, and 
considered it imperative to raise their children as Jews. They did not fret 
over every jot and tittle of Jewish law, of halachah, but neither did they 
purposefully set out to become just like the Protestants around them. 
As these Jews acted—and this book puts action well above ideology—
they did so with little guidance from authoritative sources or religious 
leaders. Their actions grew from the ground up, bearing witness to the 
imperatives of frontier small-town life. 
 Rabin’s book takes the nineteenth century seriously. Most American 
Jewish historians have dismissed it and the Jews who emigrated from 
the German-speaking lands as less interesting and, frankly, as less Jew-
ish, than the millions who left eastern Europe after the 1870s. So, too, 
historians have built the American Jewish narrative around the sights, 
sounds, and details of thickly populated Jewish neighborhoods, par-
ticularly of New York’s Lower East Side or Chicago’s Maxwell Street. 
Rabin makes a compelling case here that the full arc of American Jewish 
history cannot ignore the young Jewish men who pursued their liveli-
hoods by heading for the frontier. Their religious inconsistencies, crea-
tivities, and sense of empowerment as ordinary Jews may actually serve 
as a better template for thinking about how Judaism developed in 
America, even after the passing of the frontier era.    
 
 


Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteetn-Century America

Review of "Good Apples: Behind Every Bite" by Susan Futrel

Ogle, Maureen

Book Reviews and Notices      221 
home computers over time, have been enjoying a resurgence as an 
arcade-based enterprise, trading on the nostalgia felt by folks like me 
longing to recapture their misspent youth. Today’s video games still 
skew heavily toward a male point of view, pushing limits of stylized 
violence, and offer escape for the disaffected and the displaced. As 
Kocurek notes, “Video games became a point of articulation for anxieties 
over economic, cultural and technological changes” (195). This more 
circumspect conclusion has merit.  
 
 
Good Apples: Behind Every Bite, by Susan Futrell. Iowa City: University 
of Iowa Press, 2017. xiv, 252 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. $20.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Maureen Ogle, an author and historian, lives in Ames. She is 
the author of In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America 
(2013) and Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (2006). 
Susan Futrell, who grew up in Ames and now lives in Iowa City, real-
ized young that she “love[d] business when it’s done right” (5). To that 
end, she built a career in the “alternative” food system—marketing, 
sales, distribution—in Iowa and beyond. That work deposited her on 
the frontlines of the American apple industry and led to the realization 
that apples are a microcosm of the complexities and contradictions of 
the nation’s “food system.”  
 Futrell’s narrative structure in Good Apples is standard in contem-
porary popular nonfiction writing: She opens with an anecdote about 
her failed effort to buy an Iowa apple orchard that might otherwise be 
plowed under. (The auction quickly deflated her dream: She’d under-
estimated, significantly, the property’s value.) That’s followed by a 
short history of American agriculture in general and apple culture in 
particular and then by the bulk of her narrative: tales of orchard owners 
and farmers’ markets, geneticists and breeders, pickers and packers.  
 Futrell is especially good at detailing the obstacle course that is 
agriculture/food production in America: If it’s not wildfire, drought, 
and floods, then it’s federal and state paperwork, cutthroat competi-
tion, corporate farming, and grocery chain clout. And that’s just for 
“regular” apples. Toss organic and local into the equation and making 
apples becomes exponentially more difficult.  
 Then there is the apple itself. Futrell learns that an apple worth 
marketing must offer the illusion, however engineered, of adhering to 
a platonic ideal: perfect in shape and color; blemish-free; able to en-
dure both shipping and storage and still offer its buyer crisp flavor 
and texture.  
222      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Like everything connected to food, making apples is complicated, 
messy, and frustrating. Thus her conclusion that agriculture and food 
production should be treated as a “public good.” Only then can we 
ensure that small farmers survive and that all of us can afford to eat 
what we want, whether local, cheap, or somewhere in between.   
 Americans must abandon their propensity for “civic abdication,” 
she writes, and embrace consumer-citizenship (217). Citizens must ed-
ucate themselves about farming methods and technologies and sup-
port family farms, extension agents, and public research. “A healthy 
democracy requires civic responsibility: informed citizens, appreciation 
of difference, willingness to be good neighbors. Growing apples that 
feed local communities requires a democracy of taste, diversity, enter-
prise, science, and civic-mindedness. A democracy of apples” (219). 
 What Futrell misses is the long history of the American food system. 
For two centuries, policy, law, and cultural values have enshrined 
food/agriculture/food production as a “public good.” In fields and 
factories Americans built a food production system designed to feed 
masses of people with minimum labor, a system designed to ensure 
low-cost food (Americans pay less for food than anyone else on the 
planet) and an income for the men and women who labor in the fields 
and factories. The end goal? To free citizens from the drudgery of 
hands-on food production, leaving them free to invent and build; 
dream, think, and write—leaving them sufficiently well-fed, educated, 
and leisured to write books about the nation’s flawed food system. 
And reviews about the flaws in those books.  
 


Good Apples: Behind Every Bite

Review of "Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861-2015" by Timothy B. Smit

Neu, Jonathan D.

Book Reviews and Notices      205 
Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, 
Memory, and Policy, 1861–2015, by Timothy B. Smith. Knoxville: Uni-
versity of Tennessee Press, 2017. xxiv, 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, bib-
liography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Jonathan D. Neu is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Carnegie 
Mellon University. His research focuses on the Grand Army of the Republic 
and Union veterans’ civic and reform activities around the turn of the 
twentieth century. 
The Civil War sesquicentennial now lies behind us. But with continued 
commercial encroachment on historic lands, new threats to the 1906 
Antiquities Act and our national parks, and intensifying debates sur-
rounding Confederate monuments, current events have ensured that 
the war and its sacred sites have not strayed far from the nation’s col-
lective interest. In this sense, historian Timothy B. Smith’s latest work 
tracing the history of Civil War battlefield preservation is especially 
pertinent as Americans continue to grapple with the ways we remember 
and conserve our heritage.  
 Smith’s volume discusses several distinct eras of battlefield pres-
ervation—an activity that he convincingly demonstrates is “an evolu-
tionary process”—each with its own accomplishments, failures, and 
major players (xvi). He tracks four key entities over time (federal, state, 
and local governments, as well as private organizations), assesses their 
strengths and limitations, and ultimately applauds the good work that 
grassroots initiatives have achieved in filling the vacuum that a compre-
hensive, federally backed preservation policy should have provided 
from the beginning. 
 Nascent battlefield tourism and the burial of Union soldiers in pro-
liferating national cemeteries sparked the earliest preservation efforts. 
The wartime and Reconstruction-era years were dominated by non-
government and veterans groups whose activities, Smith argues, 
largely resulted in “disjointed and partisan” outcomes (16). That gave 
way to a “golden age” of battlefield preservation (the subject of 
Smith’s 2008 book, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade 
of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks) 
that emerged as a result of North-South reconciliation and the willing-
ness of a veteran-dominated Congress to establish national military 
parks around the turn of the twentieth century.  
 Later chapters break new ground by carrying the story up to the 
present day. The early twentieth-century transfer of battlefields from 
the War Department to National Park Service control, for instance, 
was a watershed moment marked by “change from veteran steward-
ship and visitation to nonveteran operation and clientele” (99). The 
206      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
New Deal era brought money and labor to help consolidate and im-
prove existing parks, even as the federal government began ceding 
new preservation efforts to state and local entities, as well as private 
groups. That trend intensified from the Civil War centennial through 
the era of 1980s fiscal conservatism (a preservation “dark age,” accord-
ing to Smith), steeling historians and preservationists to take control 
through grassroots activism. Smith concludes by touting such private 
organizations, particularly the Civil War Trust, which he admiringly 
credits as “an all-out, comprehensive, undeniable” leader in today’s 
preservation efforts (192). 
 Readers may be struck by Smith’s assertion that postwar reconcil-
iation between white Northerners and white Southerners (a phenom-
enon that historians have long linked to hindered social progress for 
African Americans and contemporary Americans’ obscured under-
standing of race and slavery as key causes of the war) had a forgotten 
silver lining. North-South accord, Smith argues, was a prerequisite for 
successful battlefield preservation as “the two sections . . . eagerly 
toiled in the same efforts” (35). That said, Smith at times overstates the 
amicability between Union and Confederate veterans, downplaying 
the many instances (recently highlighted by historians like John R. 
Neff, Barbara A. Gannon, and Caroline E. Janney) when white Union 
veterans stood up for their African American comrades and against 
Lost Cause mythology. More discussion explaining why cross-
sectional cooperation over battlefield preservation transcended Union 
and Confederate veterans’ lingering hostilities may have given Smith a 
greater claim to engage with this newer scholarship on the boundaries 
of Civil War reconciliationism.  
 Meanwhile, historians of state or local history will likely appreciate 
the lengths to which Smith goes in describing lower-level governmental 
efforts to preserve the many peripheral battlefields that escaped the fed-
eral government’s attention. Smith frequently analyzes the ways federal 
legislation (for instance, the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act) 
presented new opportunities for state and local entities to wrest control 
of preservation policy. The narrative occasionally gets bogged down 
in long lists of preservation initiatives that may have been better ad-
dressed in appendixes. But this should not take away from the recog-
nition that the author has done yeoman’s work compiling countless 
state and local preservation projects, backed by an impressive array of 
archival documentation.  
 The book’s greatest strength lies in persuasively characterizing 
battlefield preservation policy as ever changing and sensitive to political, 
economic, and cultural trends occurring in U.S. society. Smith also pro-
Book Reviews and Notices      207 
vides insightful suggestions about how and why certain persons or enti-
ties wield the power not only to preserve battlefields but also to inter-
pret those sites for the public at large. With so many Civil War memory 
studies populating academic discourse recently, Smith has commenda-
bly added battlefield preservation policy as yet another concept influ-
enced by Americans’ contentious relationship with the war’s legacy.  
 
Great Plains Bison, by Dan O’Brien. Discover the Great Plains Series. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xiii, 150 pp. Illustrations, 
maps, appendix, bibliography, index. $14.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Gregory J. Dehler is a history instructor at Front Range Com-
munity College. He is the author of The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple 
Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (2013). 
The decline of the American bison, more commonly referred to as the 
buffalo, is a well-known story. At one point as many as 30 million buf-
falo thundered across the Great Plains and beyond, but by 1890 only a 
handful of wild animals remained in its vast former range. Dan 
O’Brien does not introduce any new research on this historical drama 
but brings a fresh perspective as a South Dakota buffalo rancher. His 
love and appreciation of the animal and its natural habitat come 
through the pages of Great Plains Bison. As part of the University of 
Nebraska Press’s Discover the Great Plains series, this slim volume of 
just over 100 pages is an introduction designed to be a quick-reading 
historical and ecological overview of the bioregion’s keystone species. 
 Even though tens of millions of buffalo ranged through the Great 
Plains, the region always seemed vacant to successive waves of white 
settlers. According to the prevailing mindset, elimination of the buffalo 
was a prerequisite to settlement and development. But without the buf-
falo, the flora and fauna of the region were likewise destroyed, with dis-
astrous ecological consequences. Cattle ranches were the first to fill the 
void, but the inhospitable Great Plains, with its blizzards and droughts, 
ended that experiment. Throughout the twentieth century chemical-
intensive industrial agriculture expanded to almost every available acre, 
replacing the native environment with a regime of imported crops and 
animals that were protected by artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pes-
ticides, and supported by government policies and subsides. 
 O’Brien’s strongest chapters are the ones on agriculture, land use 
and transformation, and ranching, which are clearly the subjects the 
author knows the best. He shares several personal, almost spiritual, 
observations from his career as a buffalo rancher, which are the most 
thought-provoking and valuable aspects of the book. His closing chap-
ter calls for greater respect for the buffalo and the environment. 


Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861-2015

Review of "Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History" by Richard Edward

Nelson, Paula

Homesteading on the Plains: Toward a New History

Review of: "A Spectrum of Faith: Religions of the World in America’s Heartland," edited by Timothy Knepper, photography by Bob Blanshard

Douglas, Bill R.

110      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
state. She examines the Doctrine of Discovery, the 1819 Indian Civiliza-
tion Act, and forced assimilation and lists the more than 40 treaties that 
took place in Minnesota alone between 1805 and 1847. 
 When a Native elder asked Murphy, “When you find the truth, 
what are you going to do with it?” (138), she realized that she was on a 
journey with no end. She understood that she was obliged to tell the 
true story of how the United States was settled in hopes that it would 
help heal the scars of the land and the people. She also concluded that 
she must learn to listen to those who were not like her if she was going 
to become a more effective ally.  
 Murphy has engaged in a process of self-examination that few white 
people seem willing to undertake in public. She acknowledges her fears 
and the shame she felt over her privilege and articulates her struggle 
with clarity. White Birch, Red Hawthorn is a work of great insight and 
bravery that manages to challenge readers’ beliefs without becoming 
strident or arrogant. No matter where we live on this continent, this 
work serves as a valuable guide for all who want to understand the pro-
cess by which our cities, towns, and houses were built on top of some-
one else’s home.  
 
 
A Spectrum of Faith: Religions of the World in America’s Heartland, edited 
by Timothy Knepper, photography by Bob Blanshard. Des Moines: 
Drake Community Press, 2017. ix, 126 pp. Full-color photographs. 
$30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Bill R. Douglas lives and writes in Des Moines. His article on Des 
Moines’s Calvary Baptist Church in the 1920s appeared in the Summer 
2017 issue of Baptist History & Heritage. 
This lavishly illustrated book is the result of sending Drake University 
students to 15 Des Moines religious communities: three of the four Jewish 
congregations (no Chabad), two Sikh groups, three Muslim mosques 
(Bosnian, primarily Arab, and international), two Buddhist and two 
Hindu temples (including an ethnically Nepali Bhutanese refugee com-
munity), and three Christian churches (Orthodox, Catholic, and Prot-
estant but no Pentecostal). 
 With subsections on history, identity, space, and practice, the proj-
ect should be seen as an exercise in lived religion, as the introduction 
makes clear. The book also succeeds in its aim of uncovering the spec-
tacular contemporary diversity of religious practice in one midwestern 
city. Concentrating on practice leaves at least one major question unre-
solved: why the degree of diversity within religions in Des Moines? Of 
Book Reviews and Notices      111 
course there must be ethnic, historical, personal, and theological an-
swers, but the book does not ask the question.  
 Limiting a broad religious tradition to three congregations also 
hides much of the new ethnic diversity within Christianity: Tai Dam 
Mennonites (and animists), Burmese Baptists, Mexican Pentecostals, 
Korean Methodists, South Sudanese Presbyterians and Lutherans, and 
Congolese evangelicals (for starters) complicate a Des Moines religious 
scene that seems a long way from 1950s-era Life and Christian Century 
portrayals of Iowa religion as white, Protestant, middle-class, and gen-
erous but self-absorbed. 
 
 
Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland, by James R. Pennell. Heart-
land Foodways. Champaign, Urbana, and Chicago: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2017. xi, 192 pp. Illustrations, tables, references, index. $95.00 
hardcover, $19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Josh Sopiarz is associate professor and reference librarian for 
social sciences and government information at Governors State University. 
He has presented conference papers on craft brewing and wineries in the 
Midwest. 
James Pennell’s romp through wineries in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and 
Iowa offers readers a glimpse into the Midwest’s growing wine industry. 
Local Vino is an ode to the region’s vintners, enologists, vignerons, 
oenophiles, and casual imbibers and reflects Pennell’s quest to better 
understand the wine boom he has recently been observing in the Heart-
land. Initially, Pennell set out to write solely about Indiana’s burgeon-
ing wine industry. At his editor’s suggestion, Pennell expanded his 
scope to include wineries in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. The book benefits 
from this expansion; however, Pennell’s ethnographic approach led 
him primarily to wineries reached easily by car from his home base in 
Indianapolis. To his credit, Pennell made many such trips and did his 
homework on the industry in each of the four included states. The result 
is a lively jaunt across a swath of a region not widely known for its wine, 
but whose winemakers are clearly working to establish its reputation 
nationally, if not globally.  
 In the first half of the book, Pennell lays the groundwork for the 
project by identifying three common themes that apply across the region. 
First, local wineries provide generally “merry, festive, convivial” places 
for people to gather and socialize informally. Second, local wineries unite 
“the need for community and the desire to pursue and be rewarded for 
good work” (3). Third, local wineries benefit both from the “buy local” 
movement and the burgeoning international wine market. Pennell 


A Spectrum of Faith: Religions of the World in America’s Heartland

Review of: "Women in Agriculture: Professionalizing Rural Life in North America and Europe, 1880–1965," by edited by Linda M. Ambrose and Joan M. Jensen

Barker-Devine, Jenny

96      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Women in Agriculture: Professionalizing Rural Life in North America and 
Europe, 1880–1965, edited by Linda M. Ambrose and Joan M. Jensen. 
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. xii, 258 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, index. $65.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Jenny Barker-Devine is associate professor of history at Illinois 
College in Jacksonville, Illinois. She is the author of On Behalf of the Family 
Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism since 1945 (2013). 
With Women in Agriculture, editors Linda Ambrose and Joan Jensen pre-
sent an ambitious collection of ten skillfully crafted essays that shift cen-
tral conversations in rural women’s studies toward the issues of food 
security and women’s professional lives. For nearly 40 years, historians 
have explored the experiences of rural women within the context of the 
home and local community, grappling with the assumption that coun-
try folks negotiated traditional practices with urban-based reforms in 
agricultural science and home economics. The essays in Women in Agri-
culture reveal a more complex story, showing that rural women in 
North America and Europe played significant roles as reformers, scien-
tists, economists, and producers in shaping the technological revolu-
tions of the last century. 
 By focusing on the years between 1880 and 1965, Women in Agri-
culture captures the emergence of agricultural science, agricultural eco-
nomics, rural sociology, and home economics as distinct professional 
fields. During those years, women enjoyed access to higher education 
in greater numbers, the development of new technologies such as auto-
mobiles and radios enhanced communication, and members of margin-
alized groups, including African Americans and indigenous popula-
tions, continued efforts to realign dynamics of power. At the outset of 
these rapid changes, gendered spaces within the professions had not 
been clearly delineated, allowing some room for women to quietly con-
test patriarchal attitudes and institutions.  
 Within this context, Ambrose and Jensen argue that the women 
featured in the book’s essays, many of whom came from rural back-
grounds, challenged understandings of the New Woman as a purely 
urban phenomenon. Rural women also “sought more independence, 
visibility, and participation in public life” as they asserted that edu-
cated, middle-class women should pursue careers in agriculture (36). 
Their aspirations materialized in myriad ways: women organized 
women’s institutes (in the case of Canada and the United Kingdom) and 
educational clubs (in the case of the Netherlands); they also oversaw 
cooperatives, worked as home demonstration agents, produced radio 
shows, and conducted crucial scholarly research that set standards in 
the fields of agricultural economics, anthropology, and rural sociology.  
Book Reviews and Notices      97 
 The essays in Women in Agriculture focus primarily on women’s ef-
forts in the fields of food production and security and are arranged into 
three categories: education, experts, and extension. The first section on 
education reveals how reformers created opportunities for women to 
enter agricultural professions, from cultivation to rural sociology and 
agricultural economics. The second section on experts presents three bi-
ographical essays on women who initiated research projects or organi-
zations that defined and supported women as agricultural producers 
and professionals. Finally, in the third section on extension work, read-
ers learn about how educated experts imparted information to women 
in their local communities, and then how those women interpreted and 
applied that information.  
 The essays demonstrate that women prioritized food-related issues 
across time and throughout North America and Europe, and they ap-
proached the issue of food security with diverse strategies. The authors 
and editors made a conscious effort to link essays that might otherwise 
seem unrelated, and readers can move easily from wealthy female re-
formers in urban London to poultry operations in Montana and then 
from women’s educational programs in The Netherlands to African 
American home demonstration agents in rural Arkansas. Striking com-
monalities emerge from these varied experiences. Women’s strategies 
were shaped not so much by geography as by economic class, race, and 
patriarchy. Regardless of their location in place or time, female profes-
sionals encountered complicated, hierarchical relationships with male 
leaders in male-dominated spaces. Their success often hinged on the ap-
proval of male superiors or women’s willingness to act primarily within 
all-female spaces. At the same time, these professional women grappled 
with conflicting professional priorities and local women’s priorities.  
 Women in Agriculture unifies diverse voices that set a welcome new 
tone in the field of rural women’s studies. As Ambrose notes in her es-
say on women’s institutes in Canada and the United Kingdom, popular 
discourse and scholarly research have minimized the influence of rural 
women’s organizations and expertise. Labeling such organizations as 
conservative, limited, “inconsequential ‘tea parties,’” scholars have 
largely overlooked the power of women’s professional work in agricul-
tural fields (120). There is much to be gained from comparative studies 
that reveal how regional and temporal factors shaped women’s lives. 
Women in Agriculture opens rich new conversations that will allow schol-
ars of rural women to situate their work in broader frameworks of pro-
fessionalization, the New Woman, and food and food security studies. 
 
 


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Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 2 Spring 2018

“The young folks [want] to go in and see the Indians”: Davenport Citizens, Protestant Missionaries, and Dakota Prisoners of War, 1863–1866