Culture Wars in the Nineteenth Century Heartland

Abstract

This is a book of wide sweep, of sophisticated and multilayered analysis, and of broad significance for American historical scholarship. Jon Gjerde derives much of the power of his analysis from the work of earlier scholars. They range from Frederick Jackson Turner to the early immigration historians, the community studies scholars of the 1960s and 1970s, the ethnocultural political historians of the 1970s, the demographers and social science historians, and the many recent studies of ethnicity, the family, and migration. Reading this book is a pointed reminder of the impressively large and rich scholarly literature produced in the last half century. Gjerde has not simply synthesized this body of literature, however, but has brought together themes and arguments and mixed them with his own prodigious research in primary sources to create a book that is surely among the very best studies of ethnicity we have.