The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History

Abstract

The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 251. Index, notes, map, table. $35.00). Historians writing about the Midwest carry a historiographical burden loaded with irony: rather than argue for the distinctiveness of the Midwest, they must always demonstrate the national, even universal, significance of what is generally considered both the most American and the most amorphous of regions. (1) So begin the editors of this unusual volume of essays in which leading scholars of Midwestern topics ruminate on the collective historical identity of the region. The editors (Andrew R. L. Cayton of Miami University in Indiana and the author of works on that state, and Susan E. Gray of Arizona State University, who has produced a book on nineteenth-century Michigan settlement) point out that the middle of the United States-defined in this book as Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota-has seldom been identified by historians as a distinct region in the way of the South, the West, or New England. They set out to explore whether there was, is, or should be a historical Midwest. They show how early nineteenth-century inhabitants of the area displayed a regional identity based upon pride in dynamic economic and social progress, even though their modern counterparts mostly stress the region's mediocrity. As the editors point out, the essays that are included in this collection unite this early nineteenth-century historiography that deals with the spread of republican ideology and market capitalism in the Old Northwest with that of the new rural history about the settlement of the upper and western parts of the Midwest during the latter part of the century. Each of the authors contemplates the processes by which a regional identity of the Midwest has emerged from varied chronological and geographical experiences. The collective result is an excellent contribution to the development of a larger concept in historiography that historian Kathleen Neils Conzen calls regionality. In so doing, this volume will appeal to historians of all nations, regions, and genres. All of the essays were written by scholars who were originally Midwesterners; they were asked (by the editors) to present their personal reflections upon the region along with their intellectual interpretations. This technique, while initially jarring to the professional historian, proves both refreshing and enlightening. By examining their own perceptions of what it means to be a Mid westerner, the authors re-create the historical narrative of nineteenth-century regional inhabitants, from the enthusiasm of the early settlers on the trans-Appalachian frontier to the realism and pessimism of the turn-of-the-century pioneer novelists. So, Mary Neth tells about the regional confusion that she experienced while growing up in rural Missouri in order to illustrate the present need to rescue the lives of historical Midwestern farm women who suffered from the confusion of frontier expectations and gender discrimination. Eric Hinderaker, who grew up in Watertown, South Dakota, uses his own experiences to call for a more sophisticated examination of the role of Native Americans in the uncovering of a Midwestern historical identity. John Lauritz Larson and Nicole Etcheson, both from Indiana, use their childhood memories to facilitate their stories about how, as historians, they are trying to figure out what it meant to be a Midwesterner in the nineteenth century, especially when modern Americans have a large stake in the construction of that definition. Conzen, in her essay about the contemporary struggle to define regional identity in mid-nineteenth-century Minnesota, uses the story of St. Cloud newspaper editor Jan Grey Swisshelm. …