Book Title: Schooling: A College Life

Book Description

Schooling recounts the academic life of historian Carroll Engelhardt. He was born in an Iowa farmhouse that did not have electricity, indoor pluming, or a working furnace. While growing up on a small, diversified dairy and hog farm, his parents schooled him in the virtues of hard work and thrift.  Carroll attended nearby Elkader public school, received a diploma in 1959, matriculated at Iowa State Teachers College, (renamed State College of Iowa and subsequently University of Northern Iowa) where he graduated in 1963 with honors and a B.A. in Social Science Teaching, and earned a history doctorate the the University of Iowa in 1969.

Carroll first taught college history at Iowa as a Western Civilization Teaching Assistant during the 1964 Fall Semester and instructed his last course, American Thought and Culture, during the 2007 Winter Semester as an Adjunct Professor at Concordia College – Moorhead, Minnesota. South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 1981) published his first article, “Man in the Middle: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Postwar American Liberalism.” Six books, two book chapters, eight professional journal articles, and three entries in The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa followed. More than thirty book reviews appeared in national , regional, and state journals. The schooling his parents provided on their farm served him well in his lengthy career as a professional historian.

During Carroll’s sixty-year marriage to his college sweetheart, Joan (Jo) Hartman, the couple have traveled widely, visiting four continents, twenty-five countries, forty-six states, and one United States Territory, often with Concordia College May Seminars, initially, and subsequently with Road scholar adult education groups. They have been blessed with two daughters and four grand children (two sets of fraternal boy girl twins).

Shelia Skemp, an Iowa graduate student colleague and Professor of History Emerita, University of Mississippi writes: “Engelhardt’s beautifully crafted memoir … alternatively poignant and amusing … gives readers a glimpse into an academic world that may no longer exist.”