Iowa is the only state that lies entirely within the natural region of the tallgrass prairie. Early documents indicate that 85 percent of the state - close to 30 million acres - was covered by prairi
Working with the premise that there are much meaning and value in the "repelling beauty" of mining landscapes, Richard Francaviglia identifies the visual clues that indicate an area has been mined an
In July 1909 twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Corey left her Iowa farm to stake her claim to a South Dakota homestead. Over the next ten years, as she continued her schoolteaching career and carved ou
A Hero Perished tells Nile Kinnick's story. This grandson of an Iowa governor, the son of parents who disciplined him to strive for his measure of greatness, became a Heisman Trophy winner and natio
Raymond Carver has become a literary icon for our time. When he died in 1988 at the age of fifty, he was acclaimed as the greatest influence on the American short story since Hemingway. Carver's fr
Between 1940 and the mid 1980s, farm production expenses in America's Heartland tripled, capital purchases quadrupled, interest payments jumped tenfold, profits fell by 10 percent, the number of fa
First published in the spring of 1932, Phil Stong's whimsical and wise State Fair was an immediate success. Hollywood released a film that fall starring Will Rogers as Abel Frake and a champion hog f
This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major pla
Indian Agent Joseph Street said it well in 1833 when he described his trip across Iowa: "I had never rode through a country so full of game." In the early 1800s Iowa's deep soil, free-flowing rivers
In A Potter's Workbook, renowned studio potter and teacher Clary Illian presents a textbook for the hand and the mind. Her aim is to provide a way to see, to make, and to think about the forms of whe
Ten years after its original publication, Drake Hokanson's best-selling book continues to inspire readers to leave the interstate for a road less traveled, but one that still fuels the American pre
A Trauma Artist examines how O'Brien's works variously rewrite his own traumatization during the war in Vietnam as a never-ending fiction that paradoxically "recovers" personal experience
