Jeff Bremer: A New History of Iowa

Jeff Bremer, author of A New History of Iowa, will give a presentation at the Marshalltown Public Library on Sunday, April 27 at 2:00pm. The presentation will be in the library's community meeting rooms. 

Jeff Bremer's A New History of Iowa offers the most comprehensive history of the Hawkeye State ever written, surveying Iowa from the last ice age through the COVID-19 pandemic. It tells a new and vibrant story, examining the state's small-town culture, politics, social and economic development, and its many diverse inhabitants. Bremer features well-known individuals, such as Sauk leader Black Hawk, artist Grant Wood, botanist George Washington Carver, suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, and President Herbert Hoover. But Bremer broadens the state's story by including new voices—among them, runaway enslaved men who joined Iowa's 60th Colored Regiment in the Civil War, young female pearl button factory workers, Latino railroad workers who migrated to the state in the early twentieth century, and recent refugees from Southeast Asia and the Balkans. A New History of Iowa won the 2024 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award, which recognizes the most significant book about Iowa history published in the previous year. 

Bremer is an associate professor in the history department at Iowa State University, where he teaches classes on the early American republic, Iowa history, and business history. His first book, A Store Almost in Sight: The Economic Transformation of Missouri from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War, was published in 2014. A New History of Iowa was published in 2023 by the University of Kansas press. His next book will be a history of Des Moines, published by Indiana University Press. He has published articles in Annals of Iowa, Kansas History, Agricultural History, and Middle West Review. 

This program is free and open to the public. Beaverdale Books will have copies of A New History of Iowa for sale following the presentation. For more information, contact the library's Check Out Desk at 641-754-5738 ext. 2.