Iowa historian to make presentations in Charles City Monday

Press Staff Report

Iowa historian and author Michael Luick-Thrams will make two separate appearances in Charles City Monday.

Charles City students and the community have an opportunity to learn about 1920s Iowa history when Luick-Thrams will discuss “Hidden Histories, Taboo Topics” to Charles City High School sophomores as part of a five-week fall speaking tour.

Luick-Thrams will tell these “forbidden tales” at the Charles City High School from 9:30-11 a.m. and at the Charles City Public Library from noon-1:30 p.m.

The program includes two presentations at the Charles City High School, “Kickin’ the Kaiser” and “The Klan: The White Cancer” and one presentation at the library, “One of the Deadliest Killers Ever: The 1918 Flu Pandemic.” The public is invited to each presentation.

Luick-Thrams, executive director of Traces Center for History and Culture in Mason City, divides his time between Germany and the American Heartland, as he serves as executive director of a non-profit, educational organization in each country, both of which provide history-based public programming to educational and cultural institutions of various kinds.

He began recording Americans’ experiences in Nazi Germany in 1989, then completed doctoral studies in Berlin in 1997. Luick-Thrams has completed many speaking tours across the U.S. and, among other books, he is the author of “Out of Hitler’s Reach,” about Iowa’s Scattergood Hostel, where refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe found a new life. He was born on an Iowa farm in Cerro Gordo County.

“Kickin’ the Kaiser” examines anti-German hysteria during World War I. It begins with a survey of the vast size and scope of the pre-war German-American community in the Midwest.

It documents the “flip” that occurred in April 1917 when the US entered the war, and anti-German sentiment became socially acceptable and quite literally exploded overnight with, for some, deadly consequences. It ends by exposing the hidden connections between wartime anti-German sentiment and the subsequent enactment of Prohibition in 1920.

“The Klan: The White Cancer” presents backstories behind the three waves of America’s terroristic hydra, the Ku Klux Klan, with emphasis on the “Second Wave,” which in the 1920s stormed the American Heartland but was less anti-African American than it was rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant.

Some Iowa communities and surrounding counties contained unusually high numbers of KKK members. The speaker’s own great-grandfather — and namesake — George Michael Luick, had been in the Belmond Klan in the 1920s.

“One of the Deadliest Killers Ever: 1918’s Flu Pandemic” outlines suspected and documented origins of that cataclysm, as well as charts and maps of the infection rates, routes and tolls; articles, photos and other print-media documentation of the disease and its vast impact; a short related film; and Iowans’ responses to it, both measured and hysterical, effective and useless.

The program is supported by Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities.