5. Preservation Profiles


the Ph.D. is from North Carolina State University. He specialized in soil fertility and economics of
fertilizer use, and served over twenty-six years as department head, including nine months as Interim
Dean of the College of Agriculture. After serving on the manuscript committee of the Iowa State
University Press, Dr. Pesek was president of the Press Board since 1994. He has served on committees
and boards of a number of scientific societies, including the American Society of Agronomy, the Soil
Science Society of America and the Crop Science Society of America, the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the Soil and Water Conservation Society, and the Council for Agricultural
Science and Technology. He was president of both the American Society of Agronomy and the Soil
Science Society of America and served six years, each, as Technical Editor and Associate Editor,
respectively, for the scientific journals of these two societies. He has been a member of external review
teams for research and/or teaching in Canada, Egypt, Mexico, West Indies, and the U.S., a consultant in
several central and eastern European, African and Latin American countries, and completed two
assignments each for the Board on Agriculture of the National Research Council of the National
Academy of Sciences, and the World Bank, and one for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Dorothy A. Schwieder, university professor of history, has worked in the fields of Iowa and Midwestern
history for the past thirty years. She earned her B.A. from Dakota Wesleyan (1955), M.S. from Iowa
State (1968), and Ph.D. from University of Iowa (1981). She has taught courses in Iowa history, rural
American women, and Midwestern rural society in which she emphasized agriculture and rural life,
immigration to rural areas, rural families, and rural communities. Her research interests also include
monographs on the Iowa State University Cooperative Extension Service, rural industrial communities,
and the Old Order Amish. She has published on the lives and roles of Iowa farm women in various
history journals. Her most recent book, Iowa: The Middle Land (1996), emphasizes agriculture and rural
society in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Publications include: Black Diamonds: Life and
Work in Iowa's Coal Mining Communities 1895-1925 (1983); Buxton: Work and Racial Equality in a
Coal Mining Community (1987); Iowa, Past to Present: the People and the Prairie (1989); and 75 Years
of Service: Cooperative Extension in Iowa (1993).

Richard L. Willham received his B.S. in animal husbandry from Oklahoma A&M College in 1954 and
his M.S. in animal breeding from Iowa State University (then Iowa State College) in 1955. After military
service, he returned to ISC in 1957, and in 1959 initiated an Atomic Energy Commission swine
irradiation project. He completed his Ph.D. in 1960. In 1966, Dr. Willham returned to ISU to teach beef
cattle breeding. He wrote and popularized the "computer cow game" to teach selection principles using
performance records and conducted a classic beef-dairy crossbreeding study. Willham is active in the
beef industry and has worked with Iowa breeders, the American Angus Association--among others--and
the Beef Improvement Federation. He has traveled widely to Europe, Japan, and New Zealand, and is the
recipient of numerous beef industry, scientific, and academic honors and awards. Dr. Willham produced
ten multi-media presentations, and he is the author of twenty-seven papers, more than 100 journal papers,
almost 300 popular articles, and five books on livestock history. Major publications include The Legacy
of the Stockman (1985), which describes the change from husbandry to science, a highly significant facet
of our livestock heritage; Centuries of Fascination: Art About Livestock (1990), an exhibition for which
Dr. Willham was the guest curator; Ideas into Action, tracing the first twenty-five years of the Beef
Improvement Federation; and A Heritage of Leadership: Iowa State University Department of Animal
Science, A Story of the First 100 Years (1996).

Iowa State University Plan of Work and Project Budget

Over the course of the project, Iowa State University Library, in cooperation with other libraries in the
state, will develop a comprehensive bibliography of published materials important to the study of
agriculture and rural life in Iowa and the Midwest. The project will employ a five-person scholarly
review panel to rank titles according to their priority as research resources for humanities studies, and