Midwest (U.S. history)

The homesteading experience is being revisited with the regrowth of Midwestern Studies. What has been ignored and is now being investigated are the women homesteaders, who worked with their men (husband, brother, or father) to build farms on the wild plains. However, often forgotten among these women are the Jewish women who battled to keep their religion in an environment that was unknown to them. By understanding this minority in the western expansion experience, a greater understanding of the American experience can be uncovered.

Historians have traced the mass migration of French Canadians from the St. Lawrence River valley to the United States between the Civil War era and the Great Depression; to a lesser extent, scholars have also studied outmigration in the 1840s and 1850s. Closer scrutiny of available evidence suggests, however, that the roots of Lower Canada’s great demographic hemorrhage lie in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As cross-border infrastructure and commerce developed, French Canadians explored new opportunities in the northeastern United States and Great Lakes region. Demographic estimates, signs of an agricultural crisis, and contemporary sources all point to a migratory pattern that anticipated the grande saignée. Further research of this kind stands to change how we view not only French-Canadian mobility, but the extent of continental integration prior to the advent of railways.

Best History Book, International Latino Book Awards 2022.

While the North End has long been the beginning of the American dream for many peoples including African Americans, Southeast Asians, and Anglo Americans, it is perhaps the Mexican American community that best embodies the hopes and struggles in this part of the city. The first wave worked in the packing houses and communities with names such as El Huarache, La Topeka, and El Rock Island emerged nearby.  As the twentieth century unfolded, their children and grandchildren established a vibrant neighborhood along 21st and Broadway.  In recent years, the old industries of the area have faded while a new wave of immigrants from Latin America has been able to redefine an area.  Today, the Mexican American heritage in the North End has become one of its most defining features, an example of a broader diversity that has always made this part of the city special.

A retitled edition of "Spoon River Anthology," to aptly describe the format—epitaphs written as if from the persons recently dead (over two hundred of them) from this small town. Each short paragraph encapsulates a life, of regret, or accomplishment, or misunderstanding, or joy, or relief. And yet they are "all, all sleeping, sleeping on the hill," the portrait of small town America.  Edited by Sasha Newborn

This thesis investigates the driving force behind the change in focus from pine to hardwood species in logging operations of the upper Great Lakes of the early 20th century. Information from historical records and modern research is used to create a lumber extraction model based on principles of optimization theory and human behavioral ecology. This model is used to generate a hypothesis to be compared against historic lumber production data and tested against the archaeological record of the Ottawa National Forest. As a result, this thesis identifies depleting pine resources as the driving force behind the change from pine to hardwood harvests seen in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the early 20th century.

Literary review of a book on practical permaculture. Wisconsin farmer Mark Shepard argues persuasively that “restoration agriculture”—a style of farming that models itself after the natural ecosystems of the Midwest rather than a manufacturing facility—can not only restore biodiversity but provide better nutrition and a better economic foundation for our communities.

Using a review of several letters from the papers of Rice C. Ballard, a former Virginia slave trader, this article examines the lives " fancy girls, " a little known group of high-end, enslaved women who were sold for use as concubines or prostitutes during antebellum America. Specifically, this study uses letters from two women to demonstrate how this unique female slave encountered an industrializing America in ways that often differ from the experiences of other female slaves.

This paper offers a comprehensive interpretation of how an “Indian neighborhood” emerged in the Phillips district of South Minneapolis in the decades that followed the Second World War. It examines some of the ways that postwar urban strategies and political developments (suburbanization, the expansion of the middle class, interstate construction, and inner-city devalorization, for example) operated to divide the city by producing and sustaining discrete zones of privilege and deprivation, cementing the “structured advantage” of some and the exclusion of others. Building on this analysis, it concludes with a consideration of how the distribution of these advantages is illustrative of the enduring potency of the “colonial relation.”

The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many people – but generally not to farmers and rural communities. In this paper, we interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive at this current moment? What explains the rise and growth of white supremacist language, organization, action, and power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two key agricultural regions – California and the Midwest – we find some answers. California, we show, has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. From 'Associated Farmers' front groups of the 1930s through Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we follow the roots of authoritarian rural populism now re-emergent with Trump. The Midwest, in turn, sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing. Though often considered a bastion of right-wing sentiment, Heartland politics have successfully linked rural peoples to contest low crop prices, exploitative labor conditions, and regional disinvestments. In synthesizing lessons across cases, we provide a functional lens through which to understand contemporary prospects for emancipation. How can Othering and similar racialized constructs that have long been used to divide the working class and undermine rural organizing be dismantled? Can we meaningfully confront authoritarian rural populism without confronting the political-economic foundations of its development: notably, capitalism, its current manifestation in hegemonic neoliberalism, and failed approaches for reform? From these kernels of inquiry, we build towards a second paper focused on contemporary efforts to define and practice emancipatory change.

Slide show to accompany discussion of Welsh immigration and settlement in the American Midwest. Topics include: Overview of Welsh immigration to North America, 1600s-1900; reasons for emigration in the 19th century; agricultural and industrial immigrants; migration to the Midwest; Welsh churches and religious organizations; the Welsh language and eisteddfodau; prominent Welsh-Americans from the region.

The year was 1985, and the farm crisis was at its peak. Farm profits had declined by some thirty percent since the beginning of the decade, and projections indicated that as many as 250 farms would be foreclosed upon every day of the year. A number of states were well on the road to losing around one third of their total number of farms, an acceleration of the already potent postwar trends of rural depopulation and decline. Nineteen eighty-five was poised to be a makeit or break-it year for a large number of small and medium-scale farmers across the United States. The Farm Bill of 1981 was set to expire and Congress was beginning to prepare legislation to replace it. For farmers and their advocates across a swath of rural America that still stretched almost coast to coast, the 1985 Farm Bill was a legislative last stand, a final chance to save family farms through price supports and other beneficial federal policies. Congressman Ted Daschle (D-SD), the head of the Democratic Party's farm task force, was not willing to leave the fate of the Farm Bill to mere legislative chance. The savvy Democrat invited key witnesses to testify to legislators at this critical juncture. These star witnesses were Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, and Jane Fonda. The three were not an altogether improbable choice. All three had produced and starred in movies about the stresses on farm families in the past year-Lange had a central role opposite her partner Sam Shephard in the film Country;

The following paper explores political radicalism in Cleveland during the early twentieth century, primarily through the locus of the Cleveland May Day Riots of 1919.  In examining this event, the author pursues five avenues of investigation, or “contexts:” the “leftist” context, examining the demographics of Cleveland and its socialist movement; the “loyalist” context, revealing the contested origins and political orientation of American veteran culture; the “local” context, placing the Riots and Cleveland within the more general Midwestern socialist movement; the “national” context, displaying the newly-emerging forms of civic-nationalism and ethno-nationalism which came into conflict during the Riots; and a “Coda”, which traces the decline of the organizations and socio-political integrity of the Cleveland socialists in the decades after 1919, despite a seeming Depression-era revival.  The paper concludes by arguing for the unique place of Cleveland in American socialism’s history, particularly as a point of contrast to the historiographical consensus.

This historiographical article addresses the Midwest as a cultural geography of colonial amnesia, explores the relationship between the Midwest and the field of U.S. western history, and calls for historians of the Midwest to substantially revise regional narratives in much the same manner that new western historians did during the 1980s and 90s.

Preface

Earth science is an inherently local subject. No two places share exactly the same sequence of events that led to the way they are today. In this sense, Earth science is a subject to be explored in one’s own neighborhood, examining the detailed sequence of rocks for the history that has gone on under our feet. What is not possible from only one location is making sense of why this particular sequence of events took place when and where it did, particularly relative to sequences in other places around it.

The distribution of rocks and landforms can be explained by processes that shape areas covering thousands of kilometers, such as the volcanism, mountain building, and sedimentary basins that accompany converging plates. These processes link widely separated sequences in a common history.

Earth science educators at the Paleontological Research Institution, in working with teachers, have noted that no single source for educators exists that attempts to make sense of the disparate local features of the Midwestern United States in terms of a basic sequence of historical events and processes. Nationally distributed textbooks make few references specifically to the Midwest region. While a number of reasonably good resources exist for individual states, these do not take enough geographic scope into account to show how, say, the coals of Illinois are related to the Late Ordovician marine sedimentary rocks of southwestern Ohio, or why fossil fuels are found in some states and iron mining occurs in other nearby states. Further, these resources are not necessarily “teacher-friendly,” or written with an eye toward the kind of information and graphics that a secondary school teacher might need in their classroom. This Teacher-Friendly Guide is intended to fill this need for teachers. The volume is part of a national series of seven Teacher-Friendly Guides to regional Earth science, covering all 50 states.

Explaining why (for example, certain kinds of rocks and their mineral resources are found where they are) is the most effective way of providing students with a tool to remember and predict the nature of local Earth science. The Midwest (though, like states, an artificial political area), is of the right scale to discuss the evolution of significant portions of sedimentary basins, but also includes ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks. This means most Earth processes are illustrated by rocks present within a day’s drive, and that Earth phenomena can be illustrated with examples in areas students and teachers are likely to have been to or at least heard of. Since the rocks and landforms are relatively accessible, regional Earth science is an excellent subject for hands-on, inquiry-based teaching using, for example, real rocks and landforms. A transect across the Midwest in several places will reveal most major rock types that students should know and will come into contact with over the course of their lifetimes.

The chapters chosen are by no means an exhaustive list, but reflect especially the historical side of “solid Earth” geosciences. Each chapter starts with a brief review, then (in most chapters) describes the Earth science of three natural regions with the Midwest. There is a resource list at the end of each chapter. There is a chapter on fieldwork, not only on suggestions for how to do it, but how to integrate the field into your curriculum through “virtual fieldwork experiences.” There are chapters on Big Ideas in Earth system science—a few major conceptual ideas that run throughout the subject—and on using real-world regional Earth science in the context of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

We would hope for our students that, years from now, they will be able to make sense of the place they live and the places they visit, through a comprehension of a few Big Ideas and a basic grasp of the “big picture” story of geological history of their area. It is our hope that this book might help teachers, and their students, grasp such a coherent understanding of their regional and local Earth system science.

From 2000 to 2010, the Latino population increased by more than 73 percent across eight midwestern states. These interdisciplinary essays explore issues of history, education, literature, art, and politics defining today’s Latina/o Midwest. Some contributors delve into the Latina/o revitalization of rural areas, where communities have launched bold experiments in dual-language immersion education while seeing integrated neighborhoods, churches, and sports teams become the norm. Others reveal metro areas as laboratories for emerging Latino subjectivities, places where for some, the term Latina/o itself corresponds to a new type of lived identity as different Latina/o groups interact in shared neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.

Ce mémoire s'intéresse à la scène Punk Rock dans la ville de Chicago entre 1979 et 1991. Il tente de montrer que ce genre musical se construit grâce à des initiatives individuelles, la plupart du temps dans des milieux sociaux proches. De plus, les liens entre les formations musicales de la capitale économique de l'Illinois et les groupes Punk Rock du Midwest sont étudiés. Il s'agit d'un mémoire de première année de Master, ce qui explique sa taille peu importante mais il s'agit, à ma connaissance, du seul travail historique en français portant sur ce sujet.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of Native American intellectuals and activists established national organizations such as the Society of American Indians (SAI) and grappled with issues such as private property, reservation industrialization, traditional governance, Euro-American education, and individuality versus tribalism. Dennison Wheelock and Laura Cornelius Kellogg, two citizens of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, shed light on the broader Progressive Era debates that swept through Indian Country as they engaged in vigorous local and national conversations about the meaning of Indigenous empowerment in modern America and the ideal form that it should take.

From the 1899 annual edition of the Czech-American journal, Amerikán Národní Kalendář, this is the exclusive English translation of the sixteen page article "Memoirs of Czech Settlers in America".  This features unique biographies of early Czech immigrants to the United States as reported to this rare and hard to find journal.  This article features biographies of ten Czechs (Kudrle, Tobias, Capek, Novy, Cmejla, Bastar, Mikulecký, Kocián, Petrtýl, and Toepfer) who located in six states (Kansas (2), Michigan (2), North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin (4)).

Front Matter, Back Matter, Intro and selected chapters on Heinrich Börnstein. From the introductory paragraph to Michelle Jurkiewicz's chapter: "During the 1840s, a large influx of Germans migrated to the United States, with many of them settling in St. Louis, Missouri. Many felt unwelcome and under-appreciated by Americans, as their customs and lifestyle did not match the existing way of life. In spite of some controversies in his life, Heinrich Boernstein was a prominent figure in German-American rights in the mid-nineteenth century. For seventeen years, Boernstein remained in St. Louis, advocating for German rights as the publisher of Anzeiger des Westerns, or Western Reporter, a major German newspaper located in St. Louis. After living in America for seventeen years, he returned to Vienna, where he wrote a memoir of his experiences in the United States." The chapter by Michael Leverett Dorn focuses on two fateful years at mid-century, but especially the Summer of 1851 which saw Börnstein's effort to development of progressive political constituency for reform in the Great West.

This essay explores scale and corporeality in two great turn-of-urban industrial spatial systems: Chicago’s Union Stockyards and the 1909 Burnham and Bennett Plan of Chicago. Physically and conceptually imposing, the stockyards epitomized a new scale of systematic and technologized industry that transformed Chicago into the “hog slaughterer to the world” and the gateway to the Western continent. The yards also materialized new conditions for the conceptualization of living bodies: first rescaling them from the level of the individual to that of the limitless multitude (whose primary marker was efficient mobility) and then dismembering them into commodities. Such abstraction became manifest not only in the bodies of livestock, but also those of human workers whose labor also became systematized and descaled.

This article supplements Minnesota State Senator Allan H. Spear's autobiography "Crossing the Barriers" (2010), which was left unfinished following the senator's untimely death in 2008. As one of the United States' first openly gay elected officials, Spear led the charge in Minnesota to pass an amendment to the state's Human Rights Act, which at the time banned discrimination based on race and gender but not sexual orientation. After a twenty-year campaign of grassroots organizing and lobbying, in 1993 Spear's amendment was passed and signed into law by Gov. Arne Carlson. With it, Minnesota became the eighth state to include nondiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians and the first to extend those protections to the trans* community.

Winner of the 2016 Solon J. Buck Award for Best Article of the Year

This article was written with the support of a Humphrey School of Public Affairs Mondale Research Fellowship. Published in Minnesota History 65(3): Fall 2016.

Sigenauk’s War of Independence: Anishinaabe Resurgence and the Making of Indigenous
Authority in the Borderlands of Revolution
By John William Nelson

During the upheaval of the American Revolution, Indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes harnessed the uncertain geopolitics of the era to advance their own objectives in the region. Sigenauk, a leader from the Anishinaabe towns southwest of Lake Michigan, navigated these
changing dynamics to defend and expand his faction’s autonomy while simultaneously enhancing his individual influence in the wider borderland. Tracing Sigenauk’s rise to prominence highlights how such headmen blended traditional elements of Native leadership with
novel innovations to address the new opportunities and challenges posed by the conflict. Sigenauk’s machinations during the war culminated in leading a joint expedition with the Spanish against the British at Saint Joseph. Sigenauk’s successful navigation of internal
dynamics within Anishinaabewaki and the wider turmoil of the revolutionary borderlands strengthened his southwestern faction’s bid to reconstitute power in the region. Following the war, the southwestern Anishinaabeg under Sigenauk continued to flourish as a separate and
sovereign force in their homeland. The ascension of Sigenauk and the southwestern Anishinaabeg at this moment challenges common assumptions that the American Revolution ushered in an era of decline for Native peoples.

This is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook and the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

This paper analyzes the relationship between Freemasonry and Christianity, particularly in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The religion’s tenuous relationship with the fraternal society in its doctrine and anti-masonic sentiment throughout American history would seem to make it unlikely for Freemasonry to thrive in a developing, protestant, Midwestern city. However, in examining the society’s foundation in the region as well as the impact of Christian leaders within the society itself, this paper argues that a benevolent relationship with the institutional Christian church insulated Freemasonry from anti-masonic sentiment.

Thomas Frank’s new book on the tea party marks a step forward in his theorization of right-wing populism (RWP) in the United States. While previous books explained RWP’s rise resorting to problematic explanations such as 'deception' and 'betrayal', Pity the Billionaire identifies the old petty bourgeoisie (OPB) – those most heavily affected by "Obamacare" – as RWP’s class base. Frank’s identification of two kinds of neoliberal deregulation for big and small businesses is crucial for a theoretical understanding of middle-class right-wing libertarianism. Yet his account of the crisis of RWP is empirically problematic, since the OPB directly affected by the new health-care regulations amounts to less than ten thousand 'small' businesses. In the 2010 elections four out of ten voters declared themselves tea party sympathizers, showing RWP’s hegemonic appeal. In order to identify the tea party as merely an agent of big business and finance and due to the lack of a deeper understanding of neoliberal transnationalization and financialization, Frank denies the oppositional character of RWP and relapses into old notions of false consciousness.

This article examines the concept of frontier violence as it relates to Midwestern studies. Specifically, it looks at the novels of Emily St. John Mandel and Ling Ma, and argues that American culture has positioned both the frontier and Midwest as a "no-place" space of continued violence, degredation, and non-evolutionary time. However, Ma and Mandel offer an alternative to this permanent violence by imagining a Midwest (in Ma) and Great Lakes Region (in Mandel) that transcends this permanent violence with socialist ethics, focus on community, and an acknowledgement of evolutionary time. This relates directly to how historians, literary scholars, and American Studies scholars have thought about the Midwest as a geographic and cultural region.

Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building has long occupied a central place in the history of modern architecture. In The Wainwright Building: Monument of St. Louis's Lager Landscape, Paula Lupkin reexamines the canonical “first skyscraper” as a different type of monument: the symbolic center of St. Louis's “lager landscape.” Viewed through the lenses of patronage and local history, this ten-story structure emerges as the white-collar hub of one of the city's most important cultural and economic forces: brewing. Home to the city's brewery architects and contractors, a brewing consortium, and related real estate and insurance companies, the building, as Ellis Wainwright conceived it, served as the downtown headquarters of the brewing industry. Echoing the brewery stock house as well as cold storage structures and ornamented with motifs of lager's most expensive ingredient, hops, the building's design incorporated both the natural and technological elements of brewing. Analyzing the Wainwright Building as part of a lager landscape adds new dimension and significance to Sullivan's masterpiece.

This article considers the explicit link between the historical production of the Twin Cities metropolitan area (Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN) and the violence of settler colonization by examining the life and contributions of one of the urban region’s most celebrated ‘city builders’, Thomas Barlow Walker. Drawing on recent scholarship in the emergent subfield of settler-colonial studies, it demonstrates that Walker’s rise to local fame and fortune is inseparable from strategies of dispossessive accumulation that operated to valorize and legitimate the territorial and social claims of settler colonists, over and above those of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this article aims to challenge revisionist presentations that interpret the urban region as a strictly settler creation and demonstrates that settler colonial dispossession retains an explicit material trace in the urban present.

Covering the period from the 1850s to 1913, the opening chapter of Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now outlines the foundations of the institutions, practices, and attitudes that shaped the history of art in Chicago. Topics include early patronage and collecting; the impact of the Fire of 1871; the establishment of organizations, education, and exhibitions, notably the central role of the Art Institute of Chicago; the art display and decoration of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; and the tensions between art IN Chicago and the art and artists OF Chicago.

This thesis details the Phase 1 archaeological investigation into Black-Americans who
were active on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan during the mining boom of the 1850s-1880s. Using archaeological and archival methods, this thesis is a proof-of concept for future work to be done that investigates the cultural heritage of Black
Americans in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Highlights
• Discursive geographic divides inhibit shared politics across country and city chasms.
• Agrarian histories and unspoken whiteness hide the color line in the Midwest.
• Trump-style ethnonationalism is an unstable articulation of stories and experience.
• Rural precarity rarely understood as connected to broader processes of capitalism.
• Sympathetic geographic scholarship can help dis- and re-articulate rural stories.