Keynote Lecture - Digging for Your Roots in the Prairie

Speaker: Dorothy Schwieder, Professor Emerita, Iowa State University

Professor Schwieder discussed doing her own family and community history in South Dakota and gave us several humorous and poignant anecdotes of her family history.

Dorothy Schwieder is professor emerita of history, Iowa State University, where she taught history for over thirty years. Her research interests are Iowa history and midwestern history. She has presented hundreds of talks on Iowa history to groups throughout the state. She has served on the State Historical Society of Iowa Board of Trustees and on the Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau. She has written many books on Iowa history including Iowa: The Middle Land and Buxton: A Black Utopia in the Heartland,. Her book, Growing Up with the Town: Family and Community on the Great Plains, is the story of her family and community in western South Dakota. She recently co-edited a history of Iowa State University, A Sesquicentennial History of Iowa State University: Tradition and Transformation.