"From 1791, when the first school was established in what is now Wisconsin, to the consolidation of rural school districts in the 1960s, the one-room school's history has been one of growth and change. In One-Room Country Schools, Jerry Apps relays this history through his own vivid recollections of attending Chain O'Lake School in Waushara County, along with the stories of countless students and teachers who populated small country schools across...

"In this continuation of the Apps life story begun in his childhood memoir Limping through Life, Wisconsin's celebrated rural storyteller shares stories from his years at the University of Wisconsin - Madison from 1957 to 1995, when he left the university to lecture and write fulltime. During those years Apps experienced the turmoil of protests and riots at the UW in the 1960s, the struggles of the tenure process and faculty governance, and the ever-present...

"During Jerry Apps's childhood on the farm, he witnessed the second great revolution in farming-- the arrival of electric lines to rural areas, running water in barns, and new farm machines like tractors, balers, and combines. In Every Farm Tells a Story he traces that revolution by way of costs found in his mother's account books for everything from the family's first milking machine to the used telephone pole that supported their first electric...