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Now available for the first time in paperback, Farm House tells the story of the first structure built on the Iowa State University campus. Mary Atherly provides a comprehensive history of the Farm House from its founding days to its role as the center of activity for the new college to its second life as a welcoming museum visited by thousands each year. This second edition includes a discussion of the archaeological dig of 1991, which carefully excavated the area under the Farm House, and thoroughly documents the extensive renovation and reconstruction of the exterior of the house during the 1990s. New photographs add to the first edition’s rich array of images and a foreword by Gregory Geoffroy, ISU’s president since 2001, adds to its historical content. The history of Iowa’s only land-grant university and its impressive cultural and educational impact on the state and the nation as it evolved from model farm to college to modern multipurpose university is inseparable from the history of the Farm House.

Norman Anderson has written a gripping story of one of the engineering marvels of both the nineteenth and the twentieth century, the ferris wheel. The idea of this contraption may be as old as the water wheel, and written descriptions and drawings of pleasure wheels go back at least four centuries. There have been dozens of experiments with design and construction—early portable wheels by Strobel, the Condermans, Sullivan and others; one-of-a-kind wheels like Schnitzler’s Asbury Park wheel with a tower and Stubb’s water-turned wheel at Electric Park in Waterloo, Iowa; giant wheels in London, Blackpool, Vienna, Paris and recently in Japan.