University of Nebraska Press

This Week in History: May 26-30, 2008

Well bloggers, it’s about that time again, yep, This Week in History! Children’s stories, the holocaust, and we’ll catch back up with our favorite womanizer King Henry VIII. And now for the events…..

May 26, 1830: The Indian Removal Act is passes by Congress.

The Indian Removal Act suggested (strongly) that many Native Americans surrender their land. For a closer, more autobiographical look at the Native community today, please check out American Indian Autobiography by H. David Brumble III.

May 27, 1933: Walt Disney releases the Three Little Pigs, featuring the hit song “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”

If kiddie tales is your idea of quality literature (and to all those with young children, then I understand that it may be…) then please check out the best UNP has to offer with Twinkle Tales by L. Frank Baum, renowned author of The Wizard of Oz.

May 28, 1952: The women of Greece are given the right to vote.

The independence of women has long been a hot issue, and reading Eight Women, Two Model T’s, and the American West, by Joanne Wilke is a perfect way to celebrate it.

May 29, 1940: The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp called Auschwitz.

The Holocaust is an appalling time in our history, yet there were moments of true goodness going on amidst it. Good Neighbors, Bad Times by Mimi Schwartz, chronicling the good deeds done by one village, may shed some light on this dark story.

May 30, 1536: King Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour preceding this execution of Anne Boleyn.

Oh, will his antics never end! King Henry VIII may be famous for falling in love (also for being crazy, ruthless, and violent), but having 8 wives and executing two of them has never made for an ideal man. If romance happens to be up your alley, then may I introduce Mr. Ted Kooser and his book of poetry, Valentines. Read it, and even a King won’t be able to hold a candle to him.

Well, bloggers thanks for checking us out! See you next week for Tuesday Trivia.

Praise for Women, Marriage, and Wealth

Women, Marriage, and Wealth: The Impact of Marital Status on the Economic Well-Being of Women Through the Lifecourse by Joyce A. Joyce

“A comprehensive, credible analysis of the patterns and variations in the likelihood that women will spend their elderly years in poverty. . . . Joyce makes an accessible case that the economic infrastructure of old age support—including attitudes toward women in their families—must change to reduce the risk of poverty for older widows or divorced and never-married women.”—CHOICE

Ancestral Adventures

An Interview with Joanne Wilke, Author of Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West

In 1924 eight young women drove across the American West in two Model T Fords. A group of farm girls who met while attending Iowa’s Teacher’s College, they shared a sense of adventure and a “yen to see some things.” In nine weeks they traveled more than nine thousand unpaved miles on an extended car-camping trip through six national parks, “without a man or a gun along.” Joanne Wilke’s grandmother and great-aunt were among the fearless females who embarked on this rousing expedition. Now Wilke is the author of a new book detailing their unique journey, Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West (University of Nebraska Press). We chatted with her about the book, the challenges she faced in her research, and what she gained from the experience of chronicling a piece of her family’s history.

Q: What inspired you to write this book?

JW: I wrote Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West because I was intrigued by the trip in 1924 and by the women’s stories. I thought it was a unique bit of history that could easily be lost. Additionally, two of the women, Marie and Laura, had a big impact on me personally—not only their strength and intelligence, but their zest and humor. I wanted to do them justice. Although the backbone of the book is the Model T trip, the family stories, essays, and memoirs are the heart.

Q: Do you have any tips or suggestions for writing a book based on a family history? How did you go about doing your research? What were the biggest challenges and how did you tackle them?

JW: My biggest challenge in research was the aging minds of my subjects. I was able to interview four of the women, but they were so old that their memories came in snippets. They couldn’t remember what happened where or what route they took, and sometimes they confused this trip with other trips. But as the travelers passed away, their heirs sent me diaries and letters that they found. These were indispensable. In the future, I would certainly ask interview subjects directly if they had journals, letters, or pictures saved. My main advice in researching family history is to maintain optimistic patience, thoroughness, and good record-keeping, but also to maintain correspondence with other family members. Don’t be afraid to contact people, even total strangers, and be willing to let the story take on a life of its own. I would also advise some research into what constitutes nonfiction (as opposed to fiction, or even creative nonfiction), just to be clear in your mind as you work.

Q: In researching and writing Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West, what did you learn about your grandmother and great-aunt that you did not know before setting out on this journey?

JW: In the process of writing Eight Women, my youthful, somewhat mythic, impressions of Marie and Laura coalesced into a fuller picture of them as human beings. I also found my connection to them was deeper than I realized.

Q: Your grandmother, great-aunt, and their cohorts set out on a long, difficult journey "without a man or a gun along" at a time when this was not at all common. How has their conviction and sense of independence inspired you in your personal and professional life? 

JW: When I was a child, I listened as my grandmother’s and great-aunt’s conversations strayed into various youthful adventures, including this trip. To me it just seemed normal. I thought all grandmothers had such stories. But I was so young and the stories came in such a natural way that it is hard to determine the impact—to separate nature from nurture. I believe that my own curiosity, sense of adventure, ability to think for myself, and a certain willful confidence expanded in their presence. Perhaps that was their true gift to me.

Joanne Wilke’s work has appeared in the Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West and Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West anthologies. She has also written pieces for the Montana Quarterly, the Pacific Review, and the Christian Science Monitor.

To read a recent article on Joanne Wilke and Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West in the Billings Gazette at http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/10/14/features/magazine/18-wilkie.txt.

For more information on the book, please visit http://nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Eight-Women-Two-Model-Ts-and-the-American-West,673240.aspx.

Nebraska to publish Knopp’s newest collection, Interior Places

The spring 2008 forecast for new essays, memoirs and other works of creative nonfiction by Cornhusker State authors looks to be unparalleled, especially for readers with an affinity and a passion for writing about the Midwest as a place and space to be savored and celebrated. Not only does Not Just Any Land (UNP, 2004) author John Price have a new book due out, but so too does Nebraska’s preeminent essayist Lisa Knopp. Her latest collection, Interior Places, will be published in March by the University of Nebraska Press / Bison Books.

If you’ve read any of Knopp’s previous books—The Nature of Home (UNP, 2002), Flight of Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (University of Iowa Press, 1998), and Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996)—you know how intelligent, intense, and incisive her literary gaze is; how passionate her prose; and how inspiring her love for and attention to the Iowa and Nebraska of her childhood and later adult life. Interior Places returns to and expands on the themes that have informed her already deep and impassioned discovery and recovery of life on the Great Plains—what it means, for example, to live in the interior of the country, the heartland, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and also what it means to be middle aged, both daughter and parent, and still discovering a deeper appreciation for what’s here now.

If you’ve never read any of Knopp’s wide-ranging essays, including memoir and nature and travel writing, you don’t want to miss this opportunity. You’ll never forgive yourself. The journey you’ll experience in reading Interior Places will be as much a journey of physical and historical discovery—a discovery of the heartland that is and why—as it will be a discovery of Knopp’s (and our, her readers’) previously unknown personal connections to the people, places and events that are and give meaning to the Midwest.

Essays in Interior Places also carry on Knopp’s much respected reflections on the resilience of nature and how land and history have unpredictably combined in wondrous ways to create the place she so fervently and eloquently called home in her previous collection, The Nature of Home. The environmental historian William Cronon once wrote that “The romantic legacy [of wilderness] means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder.” Knopp might not be writing about wilderness per se—one essay in Interior Places, for example, explores the origin, history and impact of corn on the land—but her essays nonetheless reveal her heartfelt wonder at the richness of nature and the depth of life in America’s interior places and show us—her lucky readers—what it means to be from here, the heartland. I can’t wait to return to the journey.

Inside Info on Uncle John's Nellie

As a journalist, I learned a long time ago to roll my eyes when I got a phone call or email from someone claiming to have “inside” information on a topic or person I’d written about. Oh, right. Sure thing.

Last February, when the LA Times published a story about my forthcoming book, “The Enigma Woman: The Death Penalty of Nellie May Madison,” I got an email from a man purporting to be the nephew of Nellie’s last husband, John Wagner. I’d spent months scouring all available sources, looking for information on Wagner and, out of the blue, here it was. Oh, right. Sure thing.

I wrote him back -- polite but distant. “Thanks so much for your email. Glad you enjoyed the story.” I couldn’t be too rude though; I wanted him to buy the book.