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It is 1869 and Ole and Helena Branjord are Norwegian immigrants attempting to make a new life on forty acres of central Iowa farmland. Ole is a kind, gentle man who questions his ability to provide for his family. Helena is pining for a real house, but has sadly learned through her past experiences that promises, no matter how sincere, are never certain. But Ole has lofty dreams to prove all the naysayers wrong and double his farmstead. The Branjord children each possess talents and challenges. Eleven-year-old Oline loves music. Martin is intelligent beyond his eight years. Four-year-old Berent wants to wear pants instead of the dresses Norwegian custom dictates he don every day. Populating ...
The state of Iowa is largely unappreciated and often misunderstood. It has a small population and sits in the middle of a huge country. It’s thought of as an uninspiring place full of farms and fields of corn. But Iowa represents America as surely as New York and California, and Iowa’s history is more dynamic, complicated, and influential than commonly imagined. Jeff Bremer’s A New History of Iowa offers the most comprehensive history of the Hawkeye State ever written, surveying Iowa from the last ice age through the COVID-19 pandemic. It tells a new and vibrant story, examining the state’s small-town culture, politics, social and economic development, and its many diverse inhabitant...
An entertaining and educational mirror into the past, filled with heartwarming stories, essays, photographs and artwork recounting life on the family farm.
This tribute to 100 years of vintage farm tractors is for all those who "get it": those who appreciate the lines of a recently restored tractor glistening in the sun; those who get goosebumps at the distinctive sounds of the famous Poppin' Johnnies; those who plan their budgets and days around the careful restoration of that Minne-Mo or Farmall.
Priscilla J. Brewer examines the development and history of the first American appliance—the cast iron stove—that created a quiet, but culturally contested transformation of domestic life and sparked many important debates about the role of women, industrialization, the definition of social class, and the development of a consumer economy. Brewer explores the shift from fireplaces to stoves for cooking and heating in American homes, and sheds new light on the supposedly "separate spheres" of home and world of nineteenth- century America. She also considers the changing responses to technological development, the emergence of a consumption ethic, and the attempt to define and preserve distinct Anglo-American middle class culture. There are few works that treat this significant subject, and Brewer covers impressive new ground. Extensively documented—based on letters, diaries, probate inventories, census records, sales figures, advertisements, fiction, and advice literature-this book will be valuable to scholars of American history and women's studies.
This memoir is a light-hearted social history of life in Story County during the 1940s. The decade of the 40s witnessed the death of small, family farms and the birth of agribusiness, the end of the Industrial Age and the beginning of the Computer Age, and the first faltering steps of television. It was a time of great trauma, yet for a boy growing up on farms near Roland, Iowa, the decade was filled with tranquillity and fun. Growing Up in the 40s reveals a decade with one foot firmly planted in rural small-town America and the other poised to step into the urban atomic age. It was a time when family values seemed as permanent as the great Iowa barns - a time that is now as remote as Scarlet O'Hara's antebellum South.
Endearing memories become more vivid as you page through This Old Barn, a wonderful, heartwarming anthology of stories and artwork--from such favorites as Patricia Penton Leimbach, Justin Isherwood, Grant Wood, Eric Sloane, and others--that celebrates the glorious barns of yesteryear. Whether you grew up on a farm, or wished you did, you’ll cherish This Old Barn, which will bring you back to simpler days.