| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Growing Up with the Town: Family & Community on the Great Plains. By Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. xviii, 198 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-87745-804-9.)

Studies of small-town life on the northern Great Plains in the last century are few and far between, as are those that focus particularly on family life and experiences from a child's point of view. Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder's work, which is part community study and part personal memoir, gives us valuable insights into many aspects of those matters.

Much of what Schwieder writes is familiar to me, since I grew up on a Nebraska farm surrounded by small towns that were very similar to Presho, South Dakota, her hometown. But Schwieder makes clear the place-specific quality of Presho and of towns like it, farther west and north than my childhood home, that were, as she puts it, "above all else,... shaped by [their] size and geography" so that "a culture shaped by place" resulted (p. 119). The natural environment of the Great Plains was more than simply different from the places that Presho's settlers had come from. It also determined the economy of the region and the mobility of its population, and it profoundly influenced the daily life they led, a life marked above all by hard work and the related set of values that came to validate that work as the measure of individual and family worth.

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