The state of Iowa is largely unappreciated and often misunderstood. It has a small population and sits in the middle of a huge country. It’s thought of as an uninspiring place full of farms and fields of corn. But Iowa represents America as surely as New York and California, and Iowa’s history is more dynamic, complicated, and influential than commonly imagined.

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. This new story of Iowa provides a brisk, readable narrative written for a broad audience, from high school and college students to teachers and scholars to general readers. It tells the story of ordinary and extraordinary people of all backgrounds and greatly improves our knowledge of a state whose history has been neglected. A New History of Iowa is for everyone who wants to learn about Iowa’s surprising, complex, and remarkable past.

About the Author

Jeff Bremer is associate professor of history, Iowa State University, and author of A Store Almost in Sight: The Economic Transformation of Missouri from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War. He teaches classes on the early American republic, Iowa history, and social studies methods. A former history teacher from California, he helps to coordinate ISU’s history and social studies education program. In 2024 he will teach U.S. business history for the first time. In 2019, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Northeast Normal University in China.

He has also published articles in Annals of Iowa, Kansas History, Agricultural History, Middle West Review, and contributed chapters to edited collections on the Midwest. His next book will be A Short History of Des Moines for Indiana University Press’s “Heartland History” series. It will be the first survey of the city’s history since the 1940s.