Lunch & Learn Series - January 2021

Eisenhower Presidential Library
Online

Weeding, Washing, Milking, Plowing:  Growing Up on a Midwestern Farm, 1870-1920
Dr. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

In this lecture, Professor Riney-Kehrberg will discuss the primary aspects of farm children’s lives: work, school, and play. Work was the most important element in children’s lives, followed by school and leisure. She will tell the story of the children whose labor made the continuation of their families’ enterprises possible.

Dr. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg is Distinguished Professor of History at Iowa State University, where she has taught since 2000. She is the author of Rooted in Dust:  Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play and Coming of Age in the Midwest, Always Plenty to Do:  Growing Up on a Farm in the Long Ago and The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865. She is also the editor of the Routledge History of Rural America. In 2017, she became a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society.  Currently, she is researching the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. 

The 2021 Lunch & Learn series is made possible courtesy of the Eisenhower Foundation and the Jeffcoat Foundation.