The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Iowa and the Civil War, volume 1, Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 1850-1862" by Kenneth L. Lyftog

Feis, William B.

Book Reviews and Notices      423 
 The military controlled telegraphy during the Civil War and the In-
dian Wars. The end of those conflicts spawned a national debate about 
turning the telegraph over to civilian and commercial interests during 
peacetime. Schwoch follows that debate through Iowa Senator William 
Boyd Allison’s joint congressional Commission to Consider the Present 
Organizations of the Signal Service, Geological Survey, Coast and Geo-
detic Survey, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department, 
which he chaired in the late 1880s. While the Allison Commission even-
tually split on the telegraph question, the government’s abiding interest 
in the telegraph for monitoring weather and the environment was 
handed over to the Department of Agriculture’s Weather Bureau, later 
the National Weather Service, and eventually the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  
 Wired into Nature is a carefully documented and compelling read. 
While generally well written, its chapters and narrative threads are not 
always as seamlessly connected as the communication system it de-
scribes. Unfortunately, its ambitious reach also ends by overreaching. 
The conclusion, while highlighting some of the work’s significant find-
ings, lunges for—but misses—contemporary political relevance with a 
gratuitous attempt at comparing Al Gore’s politicized global warming 
machinations with the historical significance of Frederick Jackson 
Turner’s frontier hypothesis. It is a weak finish to an otherwise interest-
ing and insightful history of the telegraph. 
 
 
Iowa and the Civil War, volume 1, Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 
1850–1862, by Kenneth L. Lyftogt. Iowa City: Camp Pope Publishing, 
2018. xvi, 416 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 
hardcover. 
Reviewer William B. Feis is professor of history at Buena Vista University. 
He is the author of “Essentially American”: General Grenville M. Dodge and 
Family (2017) and is working on an anthology of interpretive work on Iowa’s 
role in the Civil War. 
Since the publication of Benjamin F. Gue’s four-volume History of Iowa: 
From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903) and 
Olynthus B. Clark’s The Politics of Iowa during the Civil War and Recon-
struction (1911), many books and articles focusing on Iowa during the 
Middle Period have rolled off the presses. The recent Civil War sesqui-
centennial (2011–2015) spurred new interest in the conflict and resulted 
in a spate of new books coming out on the Hawkeye State, including the 
masterful Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle 
against Slavery (2013) and Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in 
424      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War (2014), both by Lowell J. Soike. 
These new offerings revealed the pressing need for a new general his-
tory of Iowa in the Civil War era.  
 Thomas R. Baker tried to fill that void with his praiseworthy The 
Sacred Cause of Union: Iowa in the Civil War (2016), but his primary focus 
on the war years meant that the prewar crises and other issues received 
far less attention. As a result, the task of writing a narrative history that 
fully captured Iowa’s story from 1846 through 1865 remained unfinished. 
Enter veteran historian Kenneth L. Lyftogt, author of two fine mono-
graphs on Iowa Civil War topics. In his first of three planned volumes 
under the title Iowa and the Civil War, Lyftogt synthesizes the state’s di-
verse Civil War experiences and provides an in-depth yet succinct anal-
ysis of Iowans caught in the political battles over the “slavery question” 
in the 1850s. He captures well the bitter partisan infighting and brings 
to life colorful political combatants like Samuel Curtis, Augustus Caesar 
Dodge, George Wallace Jones, Henry Clay Dean, James Grimes, and 
Samuel Kirkwood. His chapters on “Lawbreaking Idealists” and on 
John Brown’s time in Iowa, the Harpers Ferry raid, and the Coppoc 
brothers are especially noteworthy. With the same skill, he also de-
scribes the state’s role in the election of Abraham Lincoln, the reaction 
to the firing on Fort Sumter, the state’s mobilization for war, the courage 
and leadership of Governor Samuel Kirkwood, and the experiences of 
Iowa troops in the bloody western campaigns from Wilson’s Creek to 
Shiloh. His descriptions of the political battlefields in Iowa and Wash-
ington, D.C., and his seamless transition to the real ones in Missouri and 
Tennessee make for engaging and enlightening reading. Overall, this 
volume is worth the price of admission.  
 As often happens, however, errors great and small find their way 
into even the best books. For example, while discussing an 1853 meeting 
about the transcontinental railroad, Lyftogt refers to Samuel Curtis as a 
“commissioner of the Union Pacific Railroad” (17). However, the UP 
was not officially created until 1862, and Curtis was not named a com-
missioner until 1866. Lyftogt also states that the Virginia Military Insti-
tute (VMI) cadets providing security at John Brown’s execution in 1859 
were “commanded by the president of the institute and professor, 
Thomas J. Jackson” (85). Although a professor, the future Confederate 
general never held VMI’s highest office. Also, while using Kirkwood’s 
January 1862 speech to show his transition from Free Soil Republican to 
abolitionist, Lyftogt neglects the broader context that likely helped moti-
vate the governor’s shift. Four months before his speech, the Republican-
dominated Congress had passed the First Confiscation Act, which was 
the first significant step toward making the destruction of slavery a Union 
war aim. These minor errors, however, do not significantly detract from 
Book Reviews and Notices      425 
the author’s engaging and gifted writing style or his aptitude for making 
complex issues and events more understandable for general readers.  
 The larger and more pressing concern, however, involves the bibli-
ography. The author’s use of printed primary sources, especially those 
showcasing the rich diversity of the Iowa experience, is commendable. 
But a key expectation in writing history is that authors use—or at least 
show familiarity with—the most recent scholarship on the topic, both to 
provide adequate context and to alert readers to the important work be-
ing done by historians in the field. Unfortunately, the most important and 
relevant scholarly books and journal articles for this volume are missing 
in action, including works by Eric Foner, Lowell Soike, James McPherson, 
Elizabeth Leonard, Robert Dykstra, Timothy Smith, J. L. Anderson, Gi-
nette Ailey, Nicole Etcheson, William Garrett Piston and Richard Hatcher, 
and others. These omissions are the most vexing problem in an otherwise 
admirable book. I hope the remaining volumes will be deepened and 
enriched by an engagement with recent scholarship, especially when it 
comes to emancipation, the use of black troops, and the meaning of the 
war after 1863. If the author combines this with his deep knowledge of 
Iowa history and his engaging narrative style, his three volumes could 
indeed become the definitive history of Iowa and the Civil War.  
 
 
Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865, by 
Robert J. Cook. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. ix, 273 
pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paperback and ebook. 
Reviewer Sarah J. Purcell is L. F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell 
College. The author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revo-
lutionary America (2002), she is working on a book tentatively titled Spectacle 
of Grief: The Politics of Mourning and the U.S. Civil War. 
In recent decades, the historiography on Civil War memory has grown 
and flourished. Scholars including David Blight, Caroline Janney, Nina 
Silber, Joan Waugh, and Fitzhugh Brundage have all explored how 
memories of the Civil War influenced politics, culture, war, race relations, 
and national identity in the United States for decades after its conclusion. 
Most works agree to a certain extent that reunion, reconciliation, and 
emancipation all formed themes in Civil War remembrance, and every 
scholar notes competing Southern Lost Cause and Unionist victory 
themes, but they disagree about their relative importance and the chro-
nology of their development. 
 Robert J. Cook has brought together much of the important insight 
from this body of historiography in his brisk, new book, Civil War Mem-
ories. Cook’s work has the advantage of covering the entirety of post–
Civil War history, making his the most comprehensive entry in this 


English

Iowa and the Civil War, volume 1, Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 1850-1862

Review of: "Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s" by Felix Harcour

Campney, Brent M.S.

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 
440      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
stunning change in mass culture, the Klan enjoyed broad success be-
cause of its commodification in the popular culture of the age. “What 
sold in the 1920s, more often than not, was the Ku Klux Klan,” he finds. 
“Rather than a ‘bulwark against modernism,’ it is more profitable to 
consider the men and women of the Invisible Empire as thoroughly 
modern Americans” (9). Harcourt suggests that the Klan’s membership 
rolls provide only the barest indication of the level of popular—or at 
least tacit—support for the group. “If we approach the Klan as move-
ment rather than organization, we better appreciate the cultural politics 
and aesthetic ideology of Klannishness” (9, emphasis in original).  
 Facing both positive and negative portrayals in the mass media, 
the Klan saw some of its symbols achieve nearly universal recognition 
among supporters, opponents, and victims alike, including particularly 
the white hood and the burning cross. “Through the decade, such signi-
fiers were used to sell everything from newspaper exposés and tell-all 
memoirs to pulp novels and Tin Pan Alley tunes” (10). Journalists rep-
resenting the victims of the Klan—African Americans, Catholics, and 
Jews—often refused to yield space in their newspaper columns for the 
group’s activities in the well-founded fear that, in so doing, they might 
legitimize and spread its influence. White Protestant newspapers, 
whatever their attitudes toward the Klan (and they varied widely), 
more often submitted to the temptation to sell papers through sensa-
tional Klan coverage. “The far more common response by newspapers 
was to compete for readers by lavishing attention on the Klan. 
‘Dignified silence,’ one Klansman noted, ‘gets a newspaper nowhere’” 
(26). Similarly, theatrical performances during the decade “displayed 
the same commercial hunger for a dash of Ku Klux Klan to add spice. 
The Invisible Empire was not just featured on the front page of 
newspapers across the country, but also in Variety, alongside stories on 
George M. Cohan and Mary Pickford” (100).  
 One gentle criticism of Ku Klux Kulture: with its emphasis on na-
tional culture, it obfuscates regional valances, mashing together Klans 
from across the West, the Midwest, and the South into a sort of un-
differentiated monolith. However, in fairness to Harcourt, he should 
not be expected to provide so rich an analysis of the Klan in national 
culture and then also identify the many differences in the objectives, 
methods, and enemies of the Invisible Empire in, say, California, Iowa, 
and Georgia, respectively—and to do so all in the same volume. With 
his analysis of Ku Klux culture at the national level, the author has 
created an opportunity for other scholars to explore his findings at the 
state and regional levels. Readers of the Annals of Iowa will be pleased 
to see that Harcourt has provided considerable attention to the Klans of 
Book Reviews and Notices      441 
the Midwest (including a handful of references to Iowa) that should 
provide a good starting point for regionally focused studies.  
 Ku Klux Kulture is an outstanding book that will appeal to lay-
persons and scholars alike. It deserves a wide readership.  
 
 
Iowa Barns Yesterday and Today, Including Silos, Corncribs, Homes, and Busi-
nesses, by Karlene Kingery. Omaha: Barnhart Press, 2017. 294 pp. Color 
photographs, map, glossary, index. $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Sally McMurry is professor emerita of history at Penn State Uni-
versity. She is the author of Pennsylvania Farming: A History in Landscapes 
(2017). 
Iowa Barns represents a gargantuan labor of love stretching back to the 
1970s, when the author, Karlene Kingery, received a grant to photo-
graph barns and create a presentation that would help promote public 
appreciation of Iowa’s farming heritage. Kingery completed her photo 
tour, created her presentation, and then embarked on a five-year odys-
sey during which she gave hundreds of slide shows to audiences 
throughout the state. Several decades later she returned to the project 
and rededicated herself to barn documentation. This book is the result. 
 The book consists of hundreds of full-color barn photographs, ac-
companied by individual barn biographies that explain how and when 
each barn was built, by whom, and for what purpose. Each entry also 
includes an address. Sometimes period photos are included, or photos 
of the barn in, for example, 1979 and 2013. The photos are grouped into 
15 thematic sections. Some sections are chronological (“19th Century,” 
“Into the 20th Century”) while others focus on materials (“Brick and 
Limestone”), form (“Unique Shapes”); still others refer to uses (“Live-
stock at Home”) or themes (“Institutions and Organizations”). Readers 
unfamiliar with architectural terms will find the glossary helpful. 
Although the subtitle mentions “silos, corncribs, homes and businesses,” 
these features together account for fewer than 20 pages. 
 The barns depicted represent a remarkable range of types and forms, 
most dating to the pre–World War II era. We can recognize feeder barns 
and hay barns, for example. Wisconsin-style dairy barns and barns built 
from catalog designs are also plentiful. There are also quite a few 
unique or unusual examples, such as circular barns and European-style 
house barns. Barns in Plain Sect and other communitarian societies are 
included, although it is not always clear that they are radically different 
from mainstream barns to the same extent that their creators diverged 
from mainstream practices in other respects. There is a section on re-
purposed barns and one on barns with unusual painted decorations. 


Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s

Review of: "Letters from the Boys: Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home" by Carrie A. Meye

Margis, Matthew J.

436      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
gues that four of the politicians—Governor Emanuel Philipp, Milwau-
kee’s Socialist mayor Daniel Hoan, founding member of the Socialist 
Party of America Victor Berger, and Senator Robert M. La Follette—
“gave voice to reason” as “they tried to lead with humanity and respect 
for people and the law (238), attributes the author underscores as im-
portant for a democracy and the overall reputation of the state as “the 
war demonstrated the frightening fragility of civil liberties” (3). 
 Pifer, retired from his position as Director of Reference and Public 
Services for the Library-Archives Division of the Wisconsin Historical 
Society, credits his wife, Marjorie Hanon Pifer, as a historical analyst for 
the book. Together, they mined the archives of Wisconsin for a rich va-
riety of primary sources, including photographs and political cartoons. 
The cartoons alone merit a separate book and make theirs all the more 
fascinating while underscoring the visual nature of war on the home 
front. The book will appeal to readers interested in World War I home 
fronts but also to those interested in the history of civil liberties, immi-
gration, and politics in the upper Midwest.  
 
 
Letters from the Boys: Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home, by Carrie 
A. Meyer. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018. viii, 223 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, index. $19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Matthew J. Margis is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Mili-
tary History in Washington, D.C. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Iowa 
State University in 2016 with a dissertation on the evolution of the National 
Guard during the Progressive Era. 
The United States experienced a renewed interest in World War I dur-
ing the centennial of American entrance into the war. Carrie Meyer’s 
Letters from the Boys tells the story of the Wisconsin doughboy experi-
ence through their own words. She reproduces a series of letters pub-
lished from 1917 to 1919 in two Wisconsin newspapers (the Independent 
Register and the Brodhead News). 
 Part one of the book recounts the experiences of various soldiers 
in the 32nd Division who volunteered for service in the Wisconsin Na-
tional Guard, from their enlistment through the postwar occupation of 
Germany. Part two follows Roger A. Skinner, who enlisted in the am-
bulance corps in 1917. Skinner’s experience as an ambulance driver was 
different from that of his counterparts in the 32nd Division, but his rel-
atively long tour of duty covers the whole of American belligerency and 
provides an overview of the changing nature of the war. 
 The letters throughout the book discuss the monotony of camp life, 
the dangers and harsh conditions of trench warfare, interactions with 
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 


Letters from the Boys: Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home

Review of: "Populism and Imperialism: Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the American West, 1890-1900" by Nathan Jesse

Offenburger, Andrew

Book Reviews and Notices      431 
 Consolidation exacted a price not only on workers, but on the entire 
circus business. As the number of circus companies dwindled, large cir-
cus companies became monopolistic and less innovative. No longer 
spurred by competition, circus managers contented themselves with 
rolling out the same show season after season; the circus, which had 
formerly been regarded as a daring form of amusement, became “in-
creasingly stagnant” (179) until it began to be considered an entertain-
ment principally for children. The heyday of the circus ended nearly a 
century ago, as the advent of the automobile, motion picture, and radio 
crowded out the big top, which began to seem old-fashioned by the 
1920s.  
 Childress’s account of the show business focuses exclusively on the 
circus, neglecting the role that fairs, carnivals, and vaudeville played in 
creating the show business. But, as Childress writes, the traveling cir-
cus, as America’s “first popular amusement on a truly national scale,” 
contributed enormously to the rise of the show business and helped 
persuade Americans to accept a role for commercial entertainment in 
their lives and in their society (179). Other books offer more detail about 
the acrobats, clowns, daredevils, and animals that performed under the 
big top, but Circus Life presents an informative and interesting analysis 
of the workers and managers who created the circus and helped make 
the show business into big business.  
 
 
Populism and Imperialism: Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the Ameri-
can West, 1890–1900, by Nathan Jessen. Lawrence: University Press of 
Kansas, 2017. x, 331 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 
$39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Andrew Offenburger is assistant professor of history at Miami 
University. His forthcoming book (2019) examines how the Mexican North 
became “the next frontier” for many Americans between 1880 and 1920, 
while at the same time the region constituted an international borderland 
with global ties to southern Africa and beyond. 
In Populism and Imperialism, Nathan Jessen examines two conflicting 
currents in U.S. history during the 1890s: the push for reform among 
western Populists (and others), and the extension of American power 
beyond the nation’s shores. Defined as a coalition of Populists, silver 
Republicans, and Democrats, these reformers in trans-Missouri states 
have been long misunderstood by historians, the author suggests. Far 
from being eagle-screeching imperialists and jingoes, these farmers and 
laborers saw how capitalism had shaped the American West and dis-
trusted its expansion to Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines. As a result, 
432      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
reformers were stridently anti-imperial and critical of the global capi-
talism exhibited by the British Empire and, they feared, an American 
empire to follow. 
 How did this ideology develop between 1890 and 1900? That ques-
tion guides this book’s main contribution to the field, revealing how 
domestic and foreign politics intertwined in a decade of key political 
developments and the making of the modern American state. The first 
two chapters outline Populist ideology and give the local context of the 
three states under study (Nebraska, Colorado, and Washington). Chap-
ters three, four, and five analyze western reformers’ contributions in 
Congress as well as developments in their own states. Finally, chapters 
six, seven, and eight examine the debates “over empire and political 
economy as they played out between the reformers and conservatives 
in Congress and at the polls in 1899 and 1900” (8). Despite the book’s 
inclusion of “culture” in its subtitle, make no mistake: this is old-school 
political history based in deep research.  
 Beyond the admirable historiographical contribution of connecting 
empire to domestic reform, though, Populism and Imperialism suffers 
from some oversights. How tight was this coalition of western reformers, 
for example? While the author persuasively argues for his choice of case 
studies (trans-Missouri states of varied sub-regions), he does not clearly 
define what constitutes a reformer among the general population. This 
is a well-known challenge for any Populist historian, given the ever shift-
ing coalitions determined by region, race, gender, and class. As a result, 
one has a clearer sense of the organizations, publications, and ideologies 
driving reformers, but students and scholars unfamiliar with the era will 
wonder how (and how many) Americans counted themselves among 
the subjects of this study. In other words, for non-political actors of the 
era without a designation of “P” (Populist) or “D” (Democrat), or with-
out an explicit identity as a silver Republican, how does the author de-
cide who’s in and who’s out of the reform coalition? 
 The book’s illustrations exemplify its payoffs and its frustrations. 
One map and 15 images accompany the text. Of these, four are political 
cartoons from the usual suspects (including Judge and Harper’s Weekly); 
the remaining 11 are pictures of elected officials, all of them men, poised 
in suits, sitting for formal portraits with stern countenances common to 
the era. As with the study’s textual analysis, this approach makes sense 
on one level. Studies that focus on political history in the Gilded Age 
are going to deal with a similar cast of characters, and rightly so. But 
such methodological decisions can easily lead to antiquated political 
histories limited to white men and their views of others, a perspective 
inconsonant with current practices and, I would argue, the actual past.  
Book Reviews and Notices      433 
 This hampers the study’s breadth. For example, if this book con-
nects domestic and foreign issues, focusing on three western states, why 
is there no mention of the temperance movement? And what of suf-
frage, which receives a paragraph (37) set within a section on gender 
(read: masculinity) and brief attention on three other pages out of a total 
252? Its minimal treatment is inversely proportional to its importance 
in the 1890s; the question of suffrage—African American and female—
often overlapped with the question of citizenship, especially in the age 
of U.S. empire. In the case of Colorado, it takes but a sentence: “The 
Populists’ one substantial achievement involved their decisive support 
of a women’s suffrage amendment that ultimately appeared on the 1893 
ballot” (50). Major female leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt receive pass-
ing acknowledgment: “Populists joined state and national women’s 
suffrage leaders (including Carrie Chapman Catt) in promoting the 
measure, but they did so using explicitly economic arguments. . . . Even 
Catt—by no means an economic radical—contended that women 
would vote for free silver and economic equality” (37). Two sentences 
later, the reader is back to more familiar territory: Populist ideology, the 
economy, and capitalism. Indeed, in the entire study, only one woman 
is quoted: Sarah Emery, author of Seven Financial Conspiracies Which 
Have Enslaved the American People (1887). 
 Although the paucity of women and nonpolitical figures may tempt 
one to dismiss the study entirely, Populism and Imperialism does contrib-
ute to the field by exploring how reformers wrangled with the subject 
of empire overseas at a time when so much was on the line at home. 
 
 
Grave Marker Symbols: A Field Guide, by Loren N. Horton and Michael 
D. Zahs. Ottumwa: PBL Limited, 2018. 116 pp. Illustrations (many in 
color), glossary, bibliography, worksheet. $24.99 paperback.  
Reviewer Thomas Connors is associate professor of history at the Univer-
sity of Northern Iowa. He served as the principal historian and writer for 
the National Cemetery Administration’s Veterans Legacy Program in 2014–
2016 and has published on Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow, and the ru-
ral cemetery movement.  
Anyone walking around a Victorian cemetery will notice the wealth 
of symbolism represented on its markers. Some, like crosses and flags, 
remain familiar, but many others have become obscure, a forgotten 
vocabulary of flowers, crowns, and fraternal orders. We can connect a 
willow to mourning and perhaps a lamb to innocence but will more 
likely mistake an anchor for naval service than interpret it as a symbol 
of Christian hope.  


Populism and Imperialism: Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the American West, 1890-1900

Review of: "Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier" by James Schwoc

Atwood, Roy Alden

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.  
422      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Drawing on nearly 100 years’ worth of government documents and 
other primary sources, the author describes initially how the construc-
tion of the early telegraph networks “wired into nature” in the simple 
sense of extending the new electrical communication systems across the 
vast plains, deserts, forests, and mountains of the western frontier. He 
probes more deeply, below this “thin” or surface description, to show 
how the telegraph also “wired into nature” in the sense of exerting sig-
nificant influences directly into and upon the natural and social environments 
it touched. He adds some helpful new insights into the familiar (e.g., 
how the telegraph contributed to the building of the railroads and aided 
the western gold rushes) and reveals new insights into the less familiar 
(e.g., the telegraph’s role in starting the Great Prairie Fire of 1865 and its 
use as an early weather reporting system). Perhaps most significantly, 
the author explains how the telegraph “wired into nature” in the sense 
that it became a key instrument for the advancement of military, political, and 
commercial control over the frontier. He describes how the U.S. Army used 
the telegraph as a weapon in the Civil War and for the suppression or 
extermination of the Plains Indians during and after the infamous Sand 
Creek Massacre of 1864.  
 One of the first telegraph lines to cross the Mississippi on the tech-
nology’s westward march linked Rock Island, Illinois, with Davenport, 
Iowa, in 1851. An underwater cable eventually reached St. Louis in 
1852. While St. Louis was a major commercial hub and an obvious cen-
ter for the Trans-Mississippi network in the first decade of its develop-
ment, the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 forced planners of the Trans-
continental Telegraph to move the line north for strategic reasons from 
Chicago through Iowa instead of Missouri, a border state with divided 
political loyalties. The transcontinental line was thus rerouted through 
Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in 1862. That move introduced those 
Iowa communities to the new communication system. 
 The vision for expanding the nascent communications network 
westward in the mid-1860s was not limited to North America, however. 
It included building a Western Union line from Seattle through Canada 
and Alaska to Czarist Russia along a Trans-Bering Strait telegraph cable. 
The herculean effort required to build that international line between 
1865 and 1867 ultimately failed because of the subarctic’s overwhelm-
ing environmental and logistical challenges and the completion of the 
rival Trans-Atlantic cable in late 1866. To this day, no cable connects the 
two continents, but the project did bring the new electrical communica-
tion network to one of the remotest corners of the continent and the new 
Alaska Territory purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7 million. 
Book Reviews and Notices      423 
 The military controlled telegraphy during the Civil War and the In-
dian Wars. The end of those conflicts spawned a national debate about 
turning the telegraph over to civilian and commercial interests during 
peacetime. Schwoch follows that debate through Iowa Senator William 
Boyd Allison’s joint congressional Commission to Consider the Present 
Organizations of the Signal Service, Geological Survey, Coast and Geo-
detic Survey, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department, 
which he chaired in the late 1880s. While the Allison Commission even-
tually split on the telegraph question, the government’s abiding interest 
in the telegraph for monitoring weather and the environment was 
handed over to the Department of Agriculture’s Weather Bureau, later 
the National Weather Service, and eventually the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  
 Wired into Nature is a carefully documented and compelling read. 
While generally well written, its chapters and narrative threads are not 
always as seamlessly connected as the communication system it de-
scribes. Unfortunately, its ambitious reach also ends by overreaching. 
The conclusion, while highlighting some of the work’s significant find-
ings, lunges for—but misses—contemporary political relevance with a 
gratuitous attempt at comparing Al Gore’s politicized global warming 
machinations with the historical significance of Frederick Jackson 
Turner’s frontier hypothesis. It is a weak finish to an otherwise interest-
ing and insightful history of the telegraph. 
 
 
Iowa and the Civil War, volume 1, Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 
1850–1862, by Kenneth L. Lyftogt. Iowa City: Camp Pope Publishing, 
2018. xvi, 416 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 
hardcover. 
Reviewer William B. Feis is professor of history at Buena Vista University. 
He is the author of “Essentially American”: General Grenville M. Dodge and 
Family (2017) and is working on an anthology of interpretive work on Iowa’s 
role in the Civil War. 
Since the publication of Benjamin F. Gue’s four-volume History of Iowa: 
From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903) and 
Olynthus B. Clark’s The Politics of Iowa during the Civil War and Recon-
struction (1911), many books and articles focusing on Iowa during the 
Middle Period have rolled off the presses. The recent Civil War sesqui-
centennial (2011–2015) spurred new interest in the conflict and resulted 
in a spate of new books coming out on the Hawkeye State, including the 
masterful Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle 
against Slavery (2013) and Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in 


Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier

Review of: "Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law" by Joseph A. Ranne

Yurs, Dale

Book Reviews and Notices       305 
and citizens who are interested in tracing Iowa’s political and legal de-
velopment. Historians will benefit in particular from the close attention 
to debates and proceedings in Iowa’s three mid–nineteenth-century 
conventions. Students of Iowa government and politics will also come 
away from this carefully researched and well-written book with an-
swers to numerous questions about the origins of institutions, rules, 
and processes that play a key role in how Iowa is governed.  
 
 
Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law, by Joseph A. Ranney. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. x, 309 pp. Graphs, notes, bib-
liography, index. $49.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Dale Yurs earned an M.A. in history at the University of North-
ern Iowa in 2011. His master’s thesis was “From a Weak Tribunal to a 
Branch of Government: The Supreme Court of the United States from 1789 
to Marshall.” 
Joseph Ranney’s book, Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law, offers 
a new look at how state law made a valuable contribution to our na-
tional legal system. Through his chronological look at Wisconsin’s legal 
history, Ranney puts the midwestern states on the forefront of legal his-
tory and shows how those states, particularly Wisconsin, created the 
system of laws that we enjoy today.  
 The book opens with a discussion of how the newly created nation 
built a legal system to span its entire territory. After winning independ-
ence from the British in 1783, the United States gained large amounts of 
land west of the Appalachian Mountains. The question became how to 
maintain law and order in the new territory. The civil law systems of 
the French and Spanish, who occupied the territory prior to the French 
and Indian War, ran a rather loose ship. Distance limited those colonial 
powers’ ability to micromanage their colonies. Therefore, Ranney argues, 
those in positions of authority required only a rudimentary knowledge 
of the law. Once the territory came under British control, the French and 
Spanish civil law systems became obsolete and a new legal system had 
to be fashioned. Responding to this need after independence, the new 
American government created the Northwest Ordinance. The progres-
sive nature of the ordinance, exemplified in its bill of rights and the pro-
hibition of slavery, created a new legal culture in the Midwest, one that 
the national legal system later adopted. 
 Ranney further shows how the Midwest’s progressive nature de-
veloped throughout the Jacksonian period. He explains how the mid-
western states embraced the premises of Jacksonian jurisprudence, 
especially expanding rights and opportunities. The ideals of the Jack- 
306      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
sonian era influenced Wisconsin’s constitution-writing process. The 
initial document the convention produced showcased broad social and 
political rights, including suffrage, homestead exemptions, and wom-
en’s rights. Ranney supports his claim that the Midwest led the march 
toward equal rights, even though the convention did not ratify all of 
those rights at once.  
 The Midwest, and Wisconsin in particular, continued this march. 
Wisconsin made the bold move to challenge the federal Congress’s 
authority by declaring the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. After 
the abolition of slavery, Wisconsin enforced antisegregation laws. 
Throughout the Progressive Era, the Midwest produced leaders like 
Robert M. Lafollette, who led the Progressive movement.  
 Ranney also shows how conservative as well as liberal ideas dis-
play the midwestern influence on national legal culture. Wisconsin falls 
on the conservative side of the issue of school vouchers, but remains on 
the forefront of shaping legal history. Through his many examples 
throughout the book, Ranney illustrates that the politics of the issue mat-
ters less than the idea of individual freedom. 
 Ranney has made a valuable contribution to the historiography of 
American legal history. Throughout the book, he uses sound logic and 
strongly supports his claims. His research brings to light many state 
laws and cases that lift the ideas discussed in the book out of obscurity. 
Readers will come away with a new appreciation for state legal systems 
and their history. Historians usually show how legal trends stem from 
the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal Congress; Ranney flips this no-
tion and shows how states, particularly those in the Midwest, have 
pushed legal trends. 
 I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys legal or state history. 
Ranney points to a variety of interesting cases and laws that stimulate 
thinking and offer a fresh look at legal trends. The book also stimulates 
pride in the Midwest. Normally we think of the coasts as driving trends, 
but here we see the Midwest at the forefront and having a lasting im-
pact on the entire nation.  
  
 
The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon 
Trails, Part 3, 1850–1855, edited by Michael L. Tate. American Trails 
Series 24. Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark Co. , an imprint of the Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 312 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $45.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South 
Bend. His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the 


Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law

Review of: "Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union's War Governors," by Stephen D. Engle

Hettle, Wallace

Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union's War Governors

Review of: "Lincoln in Indiana" by Brian R. Dirck

Bigelow, Bruce

79 
Book Reviews and Notices 
Lincoln in Indiana, by Brian R. Dirck. Concise Lincoln Library. Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. ix, 132 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bruce Bigelow is professor of geography at Butler University. His 
publications focus on Indiana during the Civil War, especially politics, and 
also on the Midwest as a culture region. 
The purpose of the Concise Lincoln Library series is to present lucid 
narratives for general readers about Lincoln based on recent research. 
Brian Dirck does a superb job in this regard, recounting Lincoln’s up-
bringing in southern Indiana near the Ohio River from 1816, when he 
was seven, to 1830, when he became an adult legally. In the first book 
dealing exclusively with Lincoln’s formative era written by a profes-
sional historian, Dirck describes the geographical, social, and political 
context of Lincoln’s upbringing. His main source is the Herndon-Weik 
collection of interviews compiled in 1865 and 1866. 
 In chapter one, “Beginnings,” Dirck follows the Lincoln family—
father Thomas, mother Nancy Hanks, older sister Sarah, Abraham, and 
cousin Dennis Hanks—as they crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky 
to Indiana in 1816, the year that the “wild region” of dense forests, dan-
gerous wildlife, and Native Americans became a state. The Lincolns 
moved because the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made the land north 
of the river free soil that had been surveyed by a grid system that made 
the sale of land orderly and unambiguous. 
 In chapter two, “Roots,” the author traces the ancestry of the Lin-
coln and Hanks families from Virginia to Kentucky. A major event in 
the Lincoln family was the murder of Abraham’s grandfather by a Na-
tive American in 1786; in the Hanks family, there was the illegitimacy 
of mother Nancy and cousin Dennis. Dirck also discusses the demands 
of family farming on the frontier, including the removal of the forest, 
the construction of housing, and disease that took the life of Abraham’s 
mother and sister. 
 In chapter three, “Mothers,” Dirck focuses on the arrival of Lincoln’s 
widowed stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, from Kentucky along with 
three children to create a blended family. Dirck employs the concept of 
“Republican motherhood” to praise Abraham’s two mothers for intro-
ducing him to books and encouraging his education. However, Lincoln 
only had about one year of formal public education. 
80      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 In chapter four, “Father and Son,” Dirck emphasizes the tension 
between Abraham and Thomas. The father provided well materially for 
his large family by farming and carpentry, but there was always the 
threat of failure and the county poorhouse. Thomas did not drink or 
gamble and was a member of a Calvinist Baptist church. Even so, 
Thomas was perceived as a “piddler” and was only semiliterate. Abra-
ham, on the other hand, disliked manual labor, read constantly, did not 
participate in organized religion, and disliked having to turn over his 
wages to his father until he reached adulthood. 
 Chapter five, “Growing,” emphasizes the alienation of father and 
son. The son created partial separation from the father by working in 
small businesses in nearby Ohio River towns and even took a long jour-
ney to New Orleans with another teenaged boy during which Abraham 
became disgusted with slavery upon seeing slaves in chains. 
 In chapter six, “Leaving,” we see Abraham helping his family move 
to the central Illinois prairie in 1830 to farm richer soil. After the move, 
Lincoln quickly divorced himself from the family by moving to the 
Springfield region in order to ascend to the professional urban class. His 
example embodied the opportunity for success for ambitious white 
men in the urbanizing antebellum Midwest. The 1787 Ordinance made 
a great difference in Lincoln’s life and for many other midwesterners.  
 
 
Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America, by 
Brian McGinty. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., a division of 
W. W. Norton & Co., 2015. 260 pp. Illustrations, timeline, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $26.95 hardcover, $15.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Marvin Bergman has been the editor of the Annals of Iowa since 
1987. He edited the Iowa History Reader (1996 and 2008) and coedited The 
Biographical Dictionary of Iowa (2008). 
The legal case Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company, better known 
as the Effie Afton case, is the subject of a paragraph or so in many histo-
ries of related topics, such as railroads, steamboats, Abraham Lincoln, 
and regional economic development in the Midwest. Here, in fewer 
than 200 pages of text, the case gets a detailed treatment and is thor-
oughly set in its context, with its ramifications also spelled out. 
 For context, readers are treated to accounts of such topics as steam-
boats and steamboating on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, the 
development of railroads and Lincoln’s advocacy of that development, 
the history of bridge building going back to Roman times and beyond, 
the history of Rock Island (which includes Dred Scott’s residence there 
as well as a brief account of the Black Hawk War, in which Lincoln 


Lincoln in Indiana

Review of: "Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865" by Robert J. Coo

Purcell, Sarah J.

Book Reviews and Notices      425 
the author’s engaging and gifted writing style or his aptitude for making 
complex issues and events more understandable for general readers.  
 The larger and more pressing concern, however, involves the bibli-
ography. The author’s use of printed primary sources, especially those 
showcasing the rich diversity of the Iowa experience, is commendable. 
But a key expectation in writing history is that authors use—or at least 
show familiarity with—the most recent scholarship on the topic, both to 
provide adequate context and to alert readers to the important work be-
ing done by historians in the field. Unfortunately, the most important and 
relevant scholarly books and journal articles for this volume are missing 
in action, including works by Eric Foner, Lowell Soike, James McPherson, 
Elizabeth Leonard, Robert Dykstra, Timothy Smith, J. L. Anderson, Gi-
nette Ailey, Nicole Etcheson, William Garrett Piston and Richard Hatcher, 
and others. These omissions are the most vexing problem in an otherwise 
admirable book. I hope the remaining volumes will be deepened and 
enriched by an engagement with recent scholarship, especially when it 
comes to emancipation, the use of black troops, and the meaning of the 
war after 1863. If the author combines this with his deep knowledge of 
Iowa history and his engaging narrative style, his three volumes could 
indeed become the definitive history of Iowa and the Civil War.  
 
 
Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865, by 
Robert J. Cook. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. ix, 273 
pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paperback and ebook. 
Reviewer Sarah J. Purcell is L. F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell 
College. The author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revo-
lutionary America (2002), she is working on a book tentatively titled Spectacle 
of Grief: The Politics of Mourning and the U.S. Civil War. 
In recent decades, the historiography on Civil War memory has grown 
and flourished. Scholars including David Blight, Caroline Janney, Nina 
Silber, Joan Waugh, and Fitzhugh Brundage have all explored how 
memories of the Civil War influenced politics, culture, war, race relations, 
and national identity in the United States for decades after its conclusion. 
Most works agree to a certain extent that reunion, reconciliation, and 
emancipation all formed themes in Civil War remembrance, and every 
scholar notes competing Southern Lost Cause and Unionist victory 
themes, but they disagree about their relative importance and the chro-
nology of their development. 
 Robert J. Cook has brought together much of the important insight 
from this body of historiography in his brisk, new book, Civil War Mem-
ories. Cook’s work has the advantage of covering the entirety of post–
Civil War history, making his the most comprehensive entry in this 
426      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
scholarly debate. Cook seeks to explain why the Civil War has been so 
long remembered and to portray how Civil War memories have always 
been contested. He argues that four themes of Civil War memory— 
Unionist, emancipationist, Southern, and reconciliatory—have inter-
twined in American culture since 1865. 
 Cook’s volume is broken into two parts: “The Postwar Period” and 
“The Modern Era,” breaking roughly at 1900. In part one he charts the 
growth of Southern Lost Cause mythology, even as Northerners and 
African Americans celebrated anti-Confederate memory traditions, but 
he ends this first part by showing how American imperial warfare in 
1898 helped to hasten sectional reconciliation. In part two he continues 
the focus on Civil War memory as an influence on subsequent Ameri-
can wars, analyzes popular culture (movies, novels, TV shows, and 
reenactments), and charts the path from the contested Civil War cen-
tennial to the rise of neo-Confederate activism and events as recent as 
Dylan Roof’s murder of nine people in the Emmanuel AME Church in 
Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Importantly, Cook treats historians 
as participants in the building of public memory, recognizing clearly 
the overlap between academics, public history, and popular culture. 
 Cook relies heavily on the work of other scholars, citing much of 
his evidence as it was quoted in other books on aspects of Civil War 
memory, but he succeeds at providing an overview of trends and bring-
ing a coherence to the topic that is sometimes hard to get hold of 
because of the slightly different focus of each scholar. Cook’s insights 
about recent U.S. politics and popular culture and his ability to put the 
events of 2015 in direct conversation with developments since 1865 also 
set his book apart from most other books on the subject, and his ability 
to write the book quickly and get it into print makes it useful for those 
seeking to put contemporary American life into historical perspective. 
 Cook’s emphasis on politics is his book’s greatest asset. He pro-
vides a clear chronology of how Civil War memory has influenced 
national (and much of state) politics, and he offers significant insight 
on how it was used as a tool by politicians as different as Ben Tillman, 
Woodrow Wilson, George Wallace, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama. 
His consistent attention to electoral politics across time sets his work 
apart from that of many other authors and makes the book well worth 
reading, although he devotes relatively less attention to some other 
key topics, such as monuments and women’s activism (other than the 
United Daughters of the Confederacy).  
 Cook is also carefully attuned to nuances of Civil War memory in 
particular state and local contexts, and readers of Iowa history will find 
much to interest them. At several points in the narrative, Cook frames 
Book Reviews and Notices      427 
Iowa as the ideal type of a place where particular state accomplishments 
and a Unionist memory of the war flourished and survived, even as 
Southern memories of the war took up greater cultural currency in later 
years. Drawing on an article he published in this journal in 2015, Cook 
discusses early Iowa regimental histories; details the Iowa legislature’s 
funding of monuments in Des Moines, Shiloh, and Vicksburg; and an-
alyzes how Governor Samuel Kirkwood and Iowa GAR posts insisted 
on emphasizing Union triumph even after more reconciliationist themes 
had taken hold nationally. 
 Civil War Memories serves as a good, comprehensive guide to an 
exciting and significant area of history. Cook’s book probably shouldn’t 
be the only one most people read on this topic, but it does helpfully 
enable us to think about the ways difficult issues such as race, violence, 
and regionalism continue to echo in our national life. 
 
 
The Hunter Elite: Manly Sport, Hunting Narratives, and American Conser-
vation, 1880–1925, by Tara Kathleen Kelly. Lawrence: University Press 
of Kansas, 2018. 348 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 
hardcover, $27.95 paperback and ebook. 
Reviewer Andrea L. Smalley is associate professor of history at Northern 
Illinois University. She is the author of Wild by Nature: North American 
Animals Confront Colonization (2017) and “ ‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women, 
Men, and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973” 
(Gender & History, 2005). 
Close your eyes and imagine a late nineteenth-century American big-
game hunter. You’re likely picturing a white man of the leisured class, 
gleefully blazing away at the last bison roaming the western prairies. 
Perhaps you’re conjuring up a portrait of a gun-toting, buckskin-wearing, 
eastern socialite posing by a string of dead deer or the severed head of 
an elk—in other words, Teddy Roosevelt. But that picture, Tara Kath-
leen Kelly tells us in The Hunter Elite, is a seriously misleading one. She 
argues that this image of the violent and hypermasculine big-game 
hunter bears no resemblance to the depictions American sportsmen 
constructed of their own hunting adventures. 
 In order to uncover the variegated meanings these men attached to 
the hunt, Kelly delves deeply into an impressive array of stories pub-
lished by sportsmen-writers at the turn of the twentieth century. She 
not only reveals how “hunting narratives became fertile sites for public 
negotiations over ideas about imperialism, national identity, gender roles, 
and even marital relations” (6) but also offers an eye-opening explanation 


Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865

Review of: "Patriotism, Courage, & Sacrifice: Warren County's Response to WW II" by Jerry K. Beatt

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