A History of the People of Iowa

ISBN: 9781331218982 出版年：2016 页码：607 Cyrenus Cole Forgotten Books

Of course no apology is necessary for writing A History of the People of Iowa, and so none will be offered. The author believes his work is not a dupli cation of any other. Not too much, but too little has been written about Iowa. The people of this state have been neglectful of their own history. Even in their schools they have taught the history of every land except their own. On one occasion the author interrogated four college girls, senior class students in a university, and was surprised to find that not one of them had a distinct idea of who James W. Grimes was. They had heard of Samuel J. Kirkwood, largely through the fact that Mrs. Jane Kirkwood, the widow of the war governor, was still living in Iowa City. They knew much about the Sabine women, but very little about their own great-grandmothers who had crossed the Mississippi in 1833, and in the years following. They knew what Curtius did in the Roman Forum, but they were wholly ignorant about the Iowa hero who held a fort while General Sherman signalled I am coming. And yet the lessons derived from human experience might have been garnered from Iowa history as well as from Roman.