Monroe County, Iowa
In 1940, Monroe County School Superintendent Ether Roberts asked the Iowa Writers’ Program to create a history of Monroe County, Iowa, for use by the county’s schoolchildren. “The good citizen should understand the tasks that confronted his forebears,” Roberts said. “What were the Indians like? How did the pioneers live?”
Only a few copies of the history were created, and fewer have survived. This new edition contains all the text of the original but is illustrated with period and modern photographs.
The Iowa Writers’ Program was a part of the Works Progress Administration, an employment program founded in 1935 to assist millions of people who were unemployed because of the Great Depression. Divisions of the WPA built public buildings, bridges, roads and parks, and operated large art, drama and literacy projects.
Michael W. Lemberger received more than a hundred national and state awards during seventeen years as a newspaper photographer. He worked in film, video, and digital media as well as creating pen-and-ink drawings. He taught photo seminars at the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a well-known archivist of historical photographs; after his death in 2016, The Lemberger Collection was donated by his family to the University of Iowa Libraries.
LeAnn Lemberger (writing as Leigh Michaels) is the author of more than 100 books, including 80 contemporary romance novels, a dozen historical romance novels, non-fiction books about writing, and local history books. More than 35 million copies of her books have been printed in 25 languages around the world. She is a six-time finalist in the Romance Writers of America RITA contest, and was honored by Iowa Library Association with the Johnson Brigham Award for an Iowa author making a contribution to literature world-wide. For more information about her, visit her website at www.leighmichaels.com.
80 pages, illustrated in black and white