Special to the Register

Every year, the State Historical Society of Iowa bestows the Shambaugh Award upon the previous year’s best book about Iowa history. The award honors Benjamin Shambaugh, who led the society for decades during the early 20th century.

This year, the top honor went to two books – one about the Catholic Church and another about women’s suffrage. The society also gave an honorable mention to a new book about the Civil War. Three members of the jury wrote the following three reviews.

'The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa: A History of the Diocese of Des Moines'

By Steven M. Avella (Liturgical Press, 458 pages)

Imagine that the most important Catholic in the world decides to visit your city. How would you plan for such a visit? Where would you hold a religious celebration for 350,000 people?

That was the challenge and opportunity embraced by Maurice Dingman, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines, when he learned that Pope John Paul II would stop in Iowa during a visit to the United States. It would be the pope’s way of celebrating the importance of Catholicism in America’s heartland.

The story of that day – October 4, 1979 – and all the planning that preceded it is told with verve and clarity in the closing chapter of “The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa” by Steven Avella, a Catholic priest and professor of history at Marquette University.

Father Avella traces the history of the diocese from its earliest days as a cluster of parishes in Iowa’s capital to its elevation as a diocese in 1911 and on to the papal visit in 1979. The book documents the important and often overlooked story of the trials and triumphs of Catholics on the American prairie.

“The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa” is divided into nine chapters that begin with the frontier days of the church in Iowa and introduce readers to the committed clergy, professed religious and determined lay people who shaped Des Moines Catholicism until 1911, when southwest Iowa parishes were clustered into a new diocese under Bishop Austin Dowling. Subsequent chapters are organized around the tenures of bishops Thomas Drumm, Gerald Bergan, Edward Daly and Maurice Dingman.

Avella is clear-eyed and professional in bringing together the story of a diocese of small cities and big towns bound together by hundreds of bustling farms. Most important, he avoids the often sanctimonious and hagiographical language that is too common in denominational histories. This is a book that will be of interest and value to any reader with an interest in state and local history.

The book concludes with that chapter on the papal visit. “The providence of God is very evident in this knoll and in all of rural America,” Bishop Dingman noted as a helicopter delivered the pope to Living History Farms, the site of the historic liturgical celebration. It was a unique day in the history of American Catholicism in general and the history of Iowa in particular.

In recognizing this book for the Shambaugh Award, the State Historical Society highlights the value and importance of religion and spiritual values in the development of our state. Iowans of many faiths – Catholics among them – contribute to the quality of life in Iowa. That is the larger meaning of this book.

Reviewer Timothy Walch is a member of the Iowa Historical Records Advisory Board and a volunteer at the Iowa City Center of the State Historical Society of Iowa.

'Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920'

By Sara Egge (University of Iowa Press, 242 pages)

In “Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920,” Sara Egge explores how formulations of gender roles sped up or slowed down the push for women’s suffrage from the end of the Civil War to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Egge teaches history at Centre College in Danville, Ky., and is a native of South Dakota. Citing the lack of sufficient scholarship on the role of Midwestern women in the women’s suffrage movement, she compares the evolution of the half-century campaign in one county in each of three Midwestern states: South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa. Using newspapers and whatever other documents she could find, she traces the changing arguments for and against votes for women.

Early champions of women’s suffrage on the national stage demanded the right to vote as part of the American commitment to equal rights of citizens. This argument, however, clashed with the established gender norms of the era that divided the public and private spheres between male and female.

Moving down from the debate at the national level, Egge chose to focus on “Yankee women” of the Midwest, primarily middle-class Protestants with New England roots in towns and small cities. These women were a primary force in the creation and support of community institutions like schools, churches and libraries. Adding in their influence as a dominant component in public issues like prohibition, these women established their claim to full citizenship based on their records of public service. Not as a right but as a civic responsibility, arguments shifted that women needed to add their voices at the ballot box for the welfare of the communities themselves.

Through their records for community involvement at the local level, Egge argues that these Midwestern Yankee women were not a minor appendage to the national drive; they powered the effort. She writes: “Local advocates did more [than national leaders] to advance woman suffrage by claiming the ballot as loyal citizens who held highly respectable records of civic activism.”

Egge’s work is useful beyond the narrow focus of women’s suffrage. She does an admirable job of triangulating Midwestern concepts of community, citizenship and civic engagement, which branches out the value of the work into social history and gender studies. It also provides an interesting foil in today’s debates on gender and equality by exploring how gains for women were achieved in the past.

Reviewer Tom Morain of Lamoni recently retired from Graceland University and is a former administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa.

'Iowa and the Civil War, Volume I: Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 1850-1862'

By Kenneth L. Lyftogt (Camp Pope Publishing, 436 pages)

Kenneth Lyftogt’s book “Iowa and the Civil War, Volume I: Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 1850-1862” is the opening volume of what is meant to be a three-volume history of Iowa’s experience in the Civil War.

The author follows the story from Iowa’s participation in abolitionism and the Underground Railroad through the Battle of Shiloh, with more presumably to come. It is a popular history, lightly footnoted, nicely illustrated, and peppered with the stories of individual Iowans who heard the call and headed off to fight.

It is the story of the men who trained with John Brown and followed him to Harper’s Ferry. It is also the story of teenaged drummer boys and Union generals. It is interspersed with homefront vignettes, such as those of young men who received white feathers and hisses from young women who believed they should be off fighting.

This is also the story of how Iowans actually fought. It is full of battles, soldiers and officers, and military logistics.

My favorite part of the military story focused on Clarissa “Clara” Hobbs, who did something most unusual when she followed her husband, an Illinois doctor, off to service. When he enlisted in the 12th Iowa Infantry, she decided to sign up, too, and left their three children with their Aunt Harriet. Possessed with a strong patriotic streak, Clara Hobbs offered her skills as a nurse at the battlefront. Her reminiscences, written during World War I, provide some of the book’s most interesting color.

However, I would have liked to have read more about the Aunt Harriets who held down the fort while family members marched off to battle. Iowa’s contribution of soldiers to the war was, proportionally, one of the greatest in the nation. Men were free to fight because there were people at home who were willing and able to carry on in their absence.

Lyftogt would have made this a more balanced treatment, and truly a history of Iowa at war, if he had spent more time on those left behind and had consulted some of the available work, such as J.L. Anderson’s essay on Iowa’s Civil War home front.

That said, the first volume of “Iowa and the Civil War” is a lively book, well written and engaging. It provides readers a chance to experience vicariously what some Iowans did when they left home and headed off to America’s bloodiest war.

Reviewer Pamela Riney-Kehrberg teaches American history at Iowa State University.

These three reviews were provided by the Iowa Culture Wire, a free service of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs.