Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.
Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.
Finding a New Midwestern History
396
Finding a New Midwestern History
396eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496208798 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 396 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Birth of the Midwest and the Rise of Regional Theory
Michael C. Steiner
Some imaginative Easterners caught glimpses of it at the Exposition, where Eastern culture and accent was swallowed up and lost in the mighty flood of the middle West, unknown and inarticulate, but tremendous in its mass.
— Hamlin Garland, 1894
Although the Midwest seems a fixture in the constellation of American regions, it has had a surprisingly brief history and a nomadic existence. In the long view of history, what we now consider the Midwest is a recent invention. As recognized today, the region consists of twelve states: the five states of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan) with Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and the eastern (tallgrass prairie) edges of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas thrown in for good measure. It wasn't until the last years of the nineteenth century that this vast territory containing a fifth of the nation's area and a third of its population was referred to as the "Middle West" and its inhabitants began to think of themselves as "Middle Westerners." Until then, this great interior with many overlapping subsections had been inhabited and shaped by a complex sequence of long-standing Indigenous cultures and relatively recent waves of colonizing settlers.
Known by numerous Native names for thousands of years prior to European colonization — and variously called Pays d'en Haut by French voyagers, and the Ohio Valley, Mississippi Valley, the Northwest, the Old Northwest, the Great West, or the Middle Border by subsequent settlers — the area we now think of as the Midwest, lacked a distinct regional consciousness and commonly accepted name until the 1890s. To trace the "birth" of the Midwest as we know it and to explore its early role as a seedbed of regional theory and practice, it is important to place this recent slice of human history within a deeper, long-standing perspective.
The Indigenous Background
The land that would be widely considered the Middle West by 1900 has a deep human history and rich Indigenous past that has been minimized, silenced, and hidden from view. The present-day region is the latest configuration in a complex layering of cultures and names stretching back many thousands of years. As Doug Kiel argues, the region's most common historical narratives are driven by a "deep-seated notion that the Midwest and its history belong to EuroAmericans." Drawing attention to the shamefully neglected Indigenous Midwest — both as historical foundation and ongoing presence — Kiel emphasizes that the region suffers from a "cultural geography of colonial amnesia" largely obliterating the Native presence from public consciousness. Asserting that "today's Midwest is a product of the frontier having erased its own tracks," Kiel urges us to recall this repressed history and acknowledge its impact on the present.
It is essential to appreciate the profound Native presence in the Midwest while also recognizing its regrettable absence in the minds of most of its non-Native inhabitants. In addition to uncovering this long-standing influence, we must also see the "Midwest" as a recently imposed construct, "a U.S. spatial category that is defined, in part, by the national project of replacing Indigenous societies." Despite the myth of the region as a blank slate for intrepid pioneers, the land that we now consider the Midwest has a complex history of textured homelands stretching back at least eleven thousand years before the Euro-American frontier. Beginning with the retreat of the continental ice sheets of the Wisconsin Glaciation that had sculpted the landscape and carved the watercourses north of the Ohio and east of the Missouri River, a complex sequence of Native cultures inhabited and shaped much of this sprawling terrain of forests and prairies. Uncovering the number of pre-Columbian inhabitants of this expanse over time is notoriously difficult and subject to heated debate. But recent demographic scholarship indicates that prior to European contact atleast two million Native Americans were living in North America east of the Mississippi, with roughly 125,000 inhabiting the Great Lakes region of that larger territory, creating a rich mosaic of agricultural and hunting-and-gathering-based societies.
The Mississippian and Mound Building cultures that flourished in the Ohio and Mississippi River watersheds between AD 800 and 1400 reflect the density and sophistication of but one phase of the pre-Columbian Midwest. The city of Cahokia, built in the rich Mississippi bottomlands opposite present-day St. Louis during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, reached a peak population of twenty thousand by AD 1350, making it by far the largest city in North America until Philadelphia had that number of inhabitants in the 1770s. It wasn't until the 1770s that the combined Euro- and African American population of the North American colonies exceeded two million, equaling the number of Native Americans who had lived in the same territory before 1492 and prior to the massive population collapse brought by the frontier. These are a few examples of the deep human history of this vast interior before it became the Middle West in the minds of its more recent inhabitants.
The territory lying between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes and stretching from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River is an immense middle ground that experienced many centuries of human history before it became the Middle West. From Cahokia in the fifteenth century to Chicago in the nineteenth century, from the interaction of French voyageurs and Native inhabitants in the 1660s and '70s to the migration of millions to the nation's new industrial heartland in the 1880s and '90s, the landscape that would be thought of as the Middle West experienced sweeping transformations. It is a long history, serving as a hidden foundation to the rise of regional consciousness and birth of the Midwest as we know it at the end of the nineteenth century. To fully portray this vast panorama or to completely depict a briefer regional era could take a lifetime. The more modest goal of this chapter is to trace the emergence of the Middle West as a place in the minds of Americans and its impact on regional thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Finding a Name for a Place
A number of scholars have convincingly argued that the present-day notion of the "Middle West" entered the national consciousness in the thirty-year period between the 1880s and 1910s. Among these scholars, James Shortridge has pushed the analysis deeper, uncovering the first use of the term Middle West in Timothy Flint's 1827 account of religious awakenings in what Flint described as "the middle western states: chiefly in Tennessee." This initial north-south ordering of space, with Tennessee and Kentucky occupying a middle position between the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest, shifted westward by the eve of the Civil War in the 1850s, with Kansas and Nebraska emerging as the new Middle West situated between the new Northwest in the Dakotas and new Southwest in Texas and the Indian Territories. By the 1890s, the Middle West shifted once again, this time northeastward, to its present-day, twelve-state location stretching from Ohio to the prairie states.
This may be a familiar story to specialists in midwestern history; what may be less familiar is the role that a generation of intellectuals, writers, and artists played at the creation of the Midwest, acting as midwives and architects to shape not only awareness of the region but also of regionalism and regional theory in general. Their first public use of the label "Middle West" can be seen as marking the birth of the region as we know it. To trace the use of words is much more than an etymological exercise. Words are artifacts, and the introduction of a new word or label offers deep historical insight, marking the "birth" of an idea and a place. "Language is not just a medium, like a water pipe," architectural historian Witold Rybczynski has argued, rather "it is a reflection of how we think ... the introduction of words into language marks the simultaneous introduction of ideas into consciousness."
The naming of things and regions are significant events, indicating that an inchoate thing or place has become a self-conscious concern, an object of deliberate thought and public attention. Underscoring the power of names on the land, Henry Nash Smith stressed the need for a series of "collective representations" — shared images of a Virgin Land, Garden of the World, Yeoman Republic, Plantation South, Wild West — to give meaning to settlers of the vast American interior. "History cannot happen," Smith argued, "without images which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence on the infinitely numerous ... and varied data of experience." In equally compelling words, Keith Basso has asserted that "place-names are among the most highly charged and richly evocative of all linguistic symbols," and concludes, "We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine." Recognizing a name is a powerful precipitant, bringing an embryonic concept or a formless space into public consciousness, and this process took place in the territory that became the Middle West in the decades following the Civil War.
Beginning in the 1890s and peaking during World War I, a remarkably varied group of self-conscious midwesterners began using the term Middle West and fashioned distinctive images of their emerging region. Many also used their sense of this new region to develop prescient theories of regionalism, becoming among the first to do so in American intellectual history. There were many inklings of this turn-of-the-century birth of midwestern identity and regional thought. Elizabeth Raymond has traced the emergence of a widespread "prairie craze" to the 1820s and "a growing body of romantic prairie paeans" over the next several decades, usually penned by travelers and tourists, thrilled by the "oceanic openness" of the seemingly endless rippling grasslands.
Although pervasive use of the term Middle West did not emerge until late in the nineteenth century, Martin Ridge has argued that even before the Civil War, the inhabitants of the Old Northwest "began to think of themselves as different. They were not part of the South, the East, or the Far West or the mountains and plains." Other scholars, including Carl Sauer and Christopher Phillips, have traced the emergence of the label "Middle Border" to the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys during the decades leading to the Civil War and discussed how it gave way to the broader notion of the Middle West in the decades following the war. This rising awareness found voice in several native sons who predicted the land's future significance and mapped its contours. In 1862, for example, Abraham Lincoln foresaw the "great interior region" that we now think of as the Midwest as "the great body of the republic"; and beginning in the late 1860s, fellow Illinoisan John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) was the first to systematically map the natural and cultural regions of North America, dividing the nascent Midwest into the "Lake-Plains" and the "Prairie-Plains."
Lincoln and Powell's great interior region quickly captured the imaginations of two great American visionaries, Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan. Following the common practice of ignoring Indigenous history, the great poet and fledging architect voiced early versions of midwestern manifest destiny, envisioning the great interior as an enormous blank slate and future global pivot point brimming with power and potential. Of his first ecstatic glimpse at the age of seventeen of the sprawling prairie, vast lake, and sweeping "dome of the sky" as his train approached Chicago, in November 1873, Sullivan recalled: "Here was power — power greater than the mountains. ... Here in full view was the light of the world, companion of the earth, a power greater than the lake and the prairie below." Six years later, after an 1879 railroad journey through Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, sixty-year-old Whitman exuberantly proclaimed the tallgrass prairies as "America's most characteristic landscape," "the theater of our great future," a beacon to the world, and the heart and soul of the nation.
Such early prophecies and epiphanies laid the groundwork for a flowering of regional thought and practice beginning in the 1890s when a generation began to think of themselves as Middle Westerners. This identity emerged from both the country and the city. During the same moment in the late 1890s when, as Raymond argues, "the agricultural Prairie Midwest had become the normative American environmental symbol," Chicago rivaled and in many ways surpassed New York as the nation's urban ideal. Beginning in the early 1890s and culminating by 1920, a number of intellectuals, artists, and public figures from both urban and rural places helped create midwestern identity and American regional theory. They were part of a climate of opinion and moment in history that encouraged people to reflect upon the land around them. In tracing this regional birth process we will see how, in less than a generation, a once vague and variously labeled landscape grew from an amorphous space, "unknown and inarticulate, but tremendous in its mass," into a distinct and powerful place seen as the dynamic center and "apotheosis of American civilization."
Many of the first generation of self-conscious midwesterners came from the rural Upper Midwest, specifically from Wisconsin and Illinois and with a scattering from Iowa and Minnesota. This early group included a remarkable concentration in or near the small town of Portage, in the Wisconsin River valley, where the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers nearly meet, and marking the historic link between the Mississippi and St. Lawrence watersheds. Frederick Jackson Turner, John Muir, Robert M. LaFollette, Frank Lloyd Wright, Zona Gale, and Georgia O'Keefe were all born in the 1860s, '70s, or '80s and lived their formative years in or within a forty-mile radius of this town of roughly five thousand people. Other significant Wisconsinites of this generation include Laura Ingalls Wilder, who spent a significant portion of her childhood in the coulee country near Pepin, and Norwegian-born cultural theorist Waldemar Ager, who lived most of his life in Eau Claire. Two powerful cultural critics who would move to the neighboring states of Minnesota and Iowa as small children were Norwegian-American Thorstein Veblen, born near Milwaukee in 1857, and Hamlin Garland, born in the coulee country near La Crosse in 1860. Norwegian immigrant novelist and cultural critic Ole Rølvaag, who lived most of his productive career in Northfield, Minnesota, contributed to this group of writers and regional theorists.
The urban Midwest also played a central role in the birth of midwestern consciousness, and Chicago was the focal point. This broad-shouldered, burstingat-the-seams metropolis, founded by black French Canadian trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable in the 1780s, had become within a century a spectacle of feverish expansion and yawning inequalities. With its disturbing contrasts between palaces along Lake Shore Boulevard and hovels behind the Union stockyards, between skyscrapers and slaughterhouses, Chicago was, in William Cronon's words, a great vortex "both glorious and abhorrent at the same time."
Beginning in the late 1880s and coming into focus during the decade following the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, an extraordinary number of cultural movers and shakers came of age in Chicago. Progressive reformers Jane Addams and John Peter Altgeld; black civil rights activists Ida B. Wells and Reverdy Ransom; novelists Hamlin Garland, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser; poets Harriet Monroe, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg; philosophers Veblen and John Dewey; architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright — all helped shift the nation's cultural center westward and expressed critical affection for their turbulent city and emerging region. Skyscrapers and prairie homes, modern poetry and naturalistic novels, egalitarian hopes and rampant inequalities — all grew from the tumultuous multiethnic ferment of Chicago and its hinterlands.
Three Architects of Midwestern Identity and Regional Theory
Three figures stand out as pioneering midwestern regionalists. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), radical writer Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), and historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) created influential images of their emerging region. They were among the first to label it the Middle West and were — along with their California contemporary Josiah Royce (1855–1916) — the first Americans to develop self-conscious regional theories and aesthetic expressions. All three were rural midwesterners with Wisconsin roots whose childhood memories shaped their thought. And each used Chicago as a precipitant and the Columbian Exposition as a platform for their regional expressions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Finding a New Midwestern History"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction: Toward a New Midwestern History Jon K. Lauck, Joe Hogan, and Gleaves Whitney Part 1. The Midwest as a Region Chapter 1. The Birth of the Midwest and the Rise of Regional Theory Michael C. Steiner Chapter 2. How Nature and Culture Shaped Early Settlement in the Midwest James E. Davis Chapter 3. First Cousins: The Civil War’s Impact on Midwestern Identity Nicole Etcheson Part 2. The Midwest’s People Chapter 4. Native Americans and Midwestern History Susan E. Gray Chapter 5. American and European Immigrant Groups in the Midwest by the Mid-Nineteenth Century Gregory S. Rose Chapter 6. Civic Life in a Midwestern Community Paula M. Nelson Chapter 7. Politics in the Promised Land: How the Great Migration Shaped the American Midwest Jeffrey Helgeson Part 3. The Iconic Midwest Chapter 8. Midwestern Small Towns John E. Miller Chapter 9. The Agrarian Midwest: A Geographic Analysis Christopher R. Laingen Chapter 10. The Role of Sports in the Midwest David R. McMahon Part 4. Midwestern Landscapes Chapter 11. The View from the River: Another Perspective on Midwestern History Michael Allen Chapter 12. The Midwest’s Spiritual Landscapes Jon Butler Chapter 13. The Development of Midwestern Cities Jon Teaford Part 5. The Midwest’s Voices Chapter 14. Of Murals and Mirrors: Midwest Regionalism Then and Now Zachary Michael Jack Chapter 15. Midwestern Intellectuals James Seaton Chapter 16. Midwestern Musicians James P. Leary Chapter 17. Midwestern Writers: The Fourth Wave David Pichaske Part 6. The Midwestern Experience Chapter 18. The Upper Midwest as the Second Promised Land Gleaves Whitney Chapter 19. Growing Up Midwestern Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Chapter 20. The Best of Babbitt: The Midwestern Vision of Arthur Vandenberg Hank Meijer Chapter 21. Of Conformity and Cosmopolitanism: Midwestern Identity since World War II J. L. Anderson List of Contributors Index