978.02 STRATTO 1981

Never before has there been such a detailed record of women’s courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier. Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience..

977.703 KALISH 2007

A memoir from a schoolteacher of growing up in the heart of the Midwest during the Great Depression describes life on an Iowa farm during a time of endless work, resourcefulness, no tolerance for idleness or waste, family, and kinship.  1: The family -- Foreground -- Great-Grandpa Jonathan -- Aunt Belle -- Thanksgiving -- 2: Building character -- Oral influences -- Literary influences -- Religious influences -- Thrift -- Medicine -- Chores -- Farm food -- An especially pleasant chore -- Water windmill -- Milking and other nightly chores -- Wash day -- Outhouses -- 3: Fall/Winter -- Country school: Monroe Number 6 -- Box social -- Gathering nuts -- Gathering wood -- Winter is Icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm! -- Town school: Garrison -- 4: Spring/Summer -- Leisure time -- Gardening -- Spring in Yankee Grove -- May baskets -- Birds -- Animal tales -- Raccoons and other critters. 

973.04948 WILLIAM 2014

This book traces the history of Finnish settlement in Wisconsin, from the large concentrations of Finns in the northern region, to the smaller "Little Finlands" created in other areas of the state. Revised and expanded, this new edition contains the richly detailed story of one Finnish woman, told in her own words, of her hardships and experiences in traveling to a new country and her resourcefulness and strength in adapting to a new culture and building a new life.

973.0494897 KNIPPIN 2008

This book traces the history of Finnish settlement in Wisconsin, from the large concentrations of Finns in the northern region, to the smaller "Little Finlands" created in other areas of the state. Revised and expanded, this new edition contains the richly detailed story of one Finnish woman, told in her own words, of her hardships and experiences in traveling to a new country and her resourcefulness and strength in adapting to a new culture and building a new life.

977.304 IBBOTSO 2002

Eloise, which started out as a poorhouse, later became known as Wayne County General Hospital. From only 35 residents on 280 acres in 1839, the complex grew dramatically after the Civil War until the total land involved was 902 acres and the total number of patients was about 10,000.  This visual history allows the reader to see the changes in 19th century health and psychiatric care in the American midwest.

978.403 LINDGRE 1996

​Land is often known by the names of past owners. "Emma’s Land," "Gina’s quarter," and "the Ingeborg Land" are reminders of the many women who homesteaded across North Dakota in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures. Land in Her Own Name records these homesteaders’ experiences as revealed in interviews with surviving homesteaders and their families and friends, land records, letters, and diaries.These women’s fascinating accounts tell of locating a claim, erecting a shelter, and living on the prairie. Their ethnic backgrounds include Yankee, Scandinavian, German, and German-Russian, as well as African-American, Jewish, and Lebanese. Some were barely twenty-one, while others had reached their sixties. A few lived on their land for life and "never borrowed a cent against it"; others sold or rented the land to start a small business or two provide money for education.For this paperback edition, Elizabeth Jameson’s new foreword situates the homesteading experience for women within the larger context of western history. 

973.04943 JOHNSON 2000

Contents; Preface; Picture a House; Mining the Family Lode; Called Back; The Glorious Fourth; Mulberries; Bulletins; Bertha's Time; Native of the Wild West; This Stranger in Uniform; Now the Future; Family Tree
In The Attic, his sequel to the classic We Have All Gone Away, Curtis Harnack returns to his rural Iowa homeplace to sift through an attic full of the trash and treasures left behind by the thirteen children in two generations who grew up in the big farmhouse. The adult Harnack had been making pilgrimages to his past from various parts of the country for thirty-plus years; now the death of an uncle and the disposal of an estate bring him home once more. The resonant diaries, church bulletins, photos, newspaper clippings, and other memories.