Iowa

Iowa, the Definitive Collection gathers for student, teacher, researcher, and leisure reader alike a rich harvest of Iowa lore as told by a bevy of its most famous and forgotten voices Iowa history as made and told by Iowans, for Iowans. Totaling over 500 browsable pages and nearly 100 highly readable, classic and contemporary selections, this mammoth compendium of Iowa history, literature, and lore captures the Hawkeye State more diversely and more comprehensively than ever before. Here is a book a big book of Iowa readings of every conceivable kind (campaign platforms, creeds, diaries, editorials, ethnographic studies, fictions, government documents, history, humor, journalism, legal opinions, letters, memoirs, pamphlets, speeches, travel narratives, and more) and of every historical vintage (from Black Hawk s lament on being ordered to move west to Iowa in 1831 to Iowa writer-anthropologist Robert Leonard s freshly-penned roll call of the many different Iowans he has known). Between these covers, world-famous sons and daughters of Iowa, including Carrie Chapman Catt, Bob Feller, Susan Glaspell, Herbert Hoover, Ted Kooser, Aldo Leopold, Glenn Miller, Wallace Stegner, Henry Wallace, Grant Wood, and many others join a chorus of forgotten or neglected native greats to tell the story of their home state as only Iowans can tell it. Perfect fodder for Iowa history and literature classes, book clubs, civic organizations, museums, libraries, and visitor centers across the Land Between Two Rivers, Iowa, the Definitive Collection offers a first-of-its-kind, popular documentary history suitable for singing loudly, proudly, and circumspectly across the State, and across generations.

Hailing from the Jack family Iowa Heritage Farm founded in 1855, Zachary Michael Jack is the author or editor of many books, including several on his native state’s history and culture, among them Letters to a Young Iowan (2007) and Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families (2008). A regular columnist for Iowa Source, a reviewer for the Annals of Iowa, and the founder-director of the Iowa School of Lost Arts for children, Zachary has served as a keynote or feature speaker at the Iowa Studies Forum, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, UNI’s Hearst Center for the Arts, and at the Irving B. Weber Chautauqua Series. A former Iowa public librarian and newspaper section editor, Zachary now teaches courses in writing, rural and urban history, and place studies at North Central College, and continues to call home his eastern Iowa farm.