Finding A History Treasure: Kitchen-Klatter Magazine

Every once in a while you stumble upon a time capsule. Not the kind buried underground or in the cornerstone of an imposing edifice, but the ephemeral trail to which digital transfer has given us access.

My treasure is a midwestern-American publication from the year 1940 called Kitchen-Klatter Magazine. It was produced and edited by Leanna Field Driftmier, a home economist and radio personality of her day based in western Iowa.

Image: Amanda Stiver

Her sister was a founder of the 4H movement and her brother owned a seed company and dabbled in radio. Additional members of the family provided articles from themes based on their expertise, one daughter, for example was a librarian and offered monthly selections from among recently published books. Other friends supplied additional columns themed according to their professional backgrounds and training.

This was all set into the background of the heyday of the Home Economist movement, which emphasized education for women, particularly in training for developing a healthy, efficient, financially secure home. But it incorporated health sciences, consumer sciences (both of which held the meat, agricultural, and packaged food industries to quality and safety standards), fashion and interior design, sewing, vocational training, cooking and meal preparation, nursing, fitness, etc. The list goes on.

Kitchen-Klatter is fascinating to read. It’s a window into the concerns and insecurities of its time. And what a time it was, in 1940 the world was at war. The U.S. was beginning to ramp up military production, wary, rightly so, that it, too, would become involved in the conflagration that had emerged in Europe and Asia.

In particular, in the latter issues of that year, October and November, Leanna Driftmier’s son, Frederick (Ted), who had been teaching at a mission sponsored school in Assiut, Egypt and regularly sent letters home to his mother, excerpts of which she included each month, began to describe the seriousness of the war situation as it drew closer and closer to Egypt and the Middle East.

Major events, like the Second World War, often become just a dry and dusty marker on the timeline of history. We can find it hard to relate to all the battles and casualties on a human scale, so when I find these very personal accounts of how a young person felt in the midst of unanticipated danger, it helps to draw down history to an relatable level.

Ted Driftmier writes in the October 1940 issue (page 5): “Besides enduring this terrible heat, there is the reality that the war is coming nearer to Egypt daily, and it is quite a nervous strain. Every airplane that flies over makes us jumpy….The Mission does not want to send us all home for probably the school can be opened in the fall and [otherwise] they would have to bring us all back again at a terrific cost. These colleges can’t be left standing [empty]. They must carry on. We will leave only when our lives are endangered but not until then.”

We, too, are facing great uncertainty in our time, with an epidemic, with political instability, so it is, in a strange way, comforting to read and relate to the uncertainty of a previous era. We can face up and move forward, despite constraining unpredictability.

That’s a historical treasure to my way of thinking. Also, there are recipes, and practical housekeeping and gardening tips, and who couldn’t use those?

Take a moment to explore the issues of Kitchen-Klatter from 1940. The magazines are in a publicly accessible digital database at Iowa State University, and available through this LINK.

October and November 1940 are especially poignant.

Keep thinking history!

~ Amanda Stiver

Mummies, Pyramids, and Science!

– Egypt and Radiocarbon Dating –

I love it when a story like this comes up in the news, “BGU Scientist Sheds Light On Ancient Egypt,” (Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, The Jerusalem Post, Jun. 21, 2010).

Using all available resources to answer archeological questions is fascinating, even if we still don’t end up with a solid conclusion. Putting science to use within the confines of its capabilities is positive, rather than toying with genetic material we don’t completely understand, we can try to better understand the history we already know.

Ever since The Mummy (the 1999 Brendan Fraser version), I’ve had a soft spot for Egyptian history. Actually it dates back further than that. Long ago, my parents went to a display of King Tutankhamen’s funerary objects and bought a souvenir booklet. I remember pouring over the images as a child, alongside, oddly enough, a coffee table book on African animals and another with images of Great Britain.

“Wonderful things”

I once discussed this fascination with a friend who was likewise enamored with ancient Egypt. We came to the conclusion that along with an interest in Biblical events of the Exodus, we thought Egypt had some of the prettiest ruins of all the ancient civilizations. The latter was not a serious, academic conclusion, but people have gone on to study a subject for worse reasons than that.

Egyptian paintings, carvings, and buildings are very beautiful. They have a stylistic element; static, yet fluid and graceful that stands apart from the realism of later Greece and Rome and the frightening, super-detailed elements of Assyrian creations. I think Egypt strikes us as at once other worldly (and the ancient Egyptians certainly thought they were, hence mummies) and cosmopolitan.

“If you build it, they will come”

And yes, those Pyramids – that’s the real cause of much interest. Who would go to all that trouble? What cultural influence and ideologies pushed a man (albeit a Pharaoh who thought he was a god) to spend all that wealth, manpower, and time constructing such a memorial when he would have been off conquering half the known world as did the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans at later dates?

I guess we’ll have to wait a while for an answer to that. In the meantime, keep your historical curiosity alive and maybe someday you’ll be the one to tell us why!

– Amanda Stiver