Bilingual Scrapbook

This scrapbook from Iowa contains poems in German and English. It was most likely assembled during the late nineteenth century. However, had it been compiled during World War I—when Iowa outlawed the use of German—this scrapbook would have been an illegal affair. Indeed, scrapbooks oftentimes served as private spaces where readers could save and read material they wouldn’t normally display in public. During the first decades of the twentieth century, for example, women regularly kept scrapbooks of suffragist poetry—creating small “rooms of their own” in which to think about and preserve socially progressive ideas.