Iowa's most conspicuous crop is corn, but its rich soil also nourishes a vigorous native art and poetry, a sturdy Americanism, sturdy Americans. One of its brightest flowers was Benjamin Franklin Shambaugh.
Benjamin Shambaugh was a gentleman and a scholar. An eminent historian, the No. 1 authority on Iowa's history, onetime president of the American Political Science Association, he was head of the political science department at the State University in Iowa City, and the favorite campus character of Iowa's undergraduates.
Perfumed, becaned, bespatted, Benjamin cut a flamboyant figure in his prairie university. He...
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