Autumn leaves depart my maples, and I see through three lawns to Route 22, where semis and pick-ups roll past Kalona. Tractors haul grain, a white-bearded man in a buggy pulls a caged hog and teenagers glide along the shoulder on e-bikes. A silver hearse from an adjacent funeral home arrives. The driver unloads a body.
Perfect, I reflect, because on Zoom, University of Iowa professor Ed Folsom discusses Emily Dickinson’s death poems. Decades ago, Professor Folsom was a mentor. Now I’m retired, as is Professor Folsom. I still learn; he still teaches and reminds me how my studies were lessons in the Great American Experiment, it’s a broad back that carried the grandeur and regrets of a country—culture, history and heroics.
Within American Studies, the “Great American Experiment” was examined.
I chose the University of Iowa for graduate work because of the outstanding American Studies program. After my initial brittle winter on the periphery of the Plains, I reconsidered but stayed and never regretted that decision. American Studies gifted me with a loom upon which I wove the strands of American life into an extraordinary pattern.
More: Lawmakers file bill to create School of Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa
When I arrived, American Studies, African American Studies, and Women’s Studies were across and adjacent to each other. Three programs from which students learned about natives, settlers, slaves, and westward movement over virgin land, migration up the Mississippi and along the Trail of Tears until the frontier closed. We digested how land was tilled, populations decimated, manufacturing industrialized, cities urbanized, and new frontiers created in cinema, music, television and technology. We distilled ideas and discussed their implications.
Before American Studies, I couldn’t envision living west of the Hudson River. After, I couldn’t imagine living east of the Mississippi. At Iowa, I absorbed author Wright Morris’ photo-texts that detailed Midwestern lives. When candidate John Dean, pictured with a Ford tractor, asked caucus-goers for their endorsement, I wrote to him: “If you want Iowans votes, don’t stand in front of a Ford. We make Deeres out here.”
More: The University of Iowa’s new School of Social and Cultural Analysis was denied. Here’s why:
After I read Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” I desired an Iowa context. I researched how migrants followed the Mississippi to Davenport, Dubuque and Waterloo to work, first for the railroad, then Rath Packing and eventually John Deere. I discovered how Chinese and Irish immigrants, and African Americans built a railway system that divided and connected the landscape, rolled over Indigenous land, fashioned intercontinental travel, and promoted the arts. When I lived in Ames, I would gaze west down two lines of railroad tracks until, as a friend observed, “the earth curves.”
W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” developed into Field of Dreams enlarged my love of baseball.I researched Iowa’s history, the railroad spurs where baseball teams developed, and where, in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Negro League teams played games in Davenport, Des Moines, Council Bluffs, and Sioux City.
American Studies taught me to engage rolling hills, great rivers, infinite horizon lines, and architectural gems like the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Cedar Rock State Park, colossal silos, punctuation marks on the Plains, according to Wright Morris, and the Effigy Mounds.
More: ‘I’m not sure what’s next’: National Park ranger in Iowa among thousands fired Friday
American Studies gifted me with context, culture and contradictions until I was able to comprehend our disparate threads; the discipline helped me understand Iowa, its history and inhabitants, as well as contemplate other locations. I continue constructing those connections, spinning threads of American life like webs the Black and Yellow Garden Spiders weave each summer in my blue hydrangeas.
We need to understand more, broaden our perceptions and collaborations. Yet, I wonder now what framework students can use to assemble the astonishing tapestry of the “Great American Experiment.”
Dian M. Gottlob was born and raised in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, but has lived in Iowa for more than four decades and considers it home. Gottlob has resided in the small town of Kalona for 25 years.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: The sunset of American Studies | Guest Opinion
