The Heartland: An American History by Kristin L. Hoganson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Heartland: An American History by Kristin L. Hoganson Michelle Martindale Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. xxvi, 399 pp. $18.00 (paper). In her new book, The Heartland: An American History, Kristin L. Hoganson continues to examine the American empire, this time focusing on the American Midwest. While the area surrounding Champaign, Illinois, sits at the center of the book, The Heartland travels to the edges of the United States and across the Atlantic to break apart the mythologies of mid-western exceptionalism. Hoganson approaches ideas of the heartland both geographically and metaphorically, revealing a space that was not insulated from nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalization. Rather, it emblematized Americans' quests to integrate themselves into new global markets. To prove that the Midwest was more complex than the insular, exceptional, isolationist, or provincial traits often ascribed to it, Hoganson takes on well-worn midwestern topics such as farming and livestock industries, birding, and hunting. Fans of Hoganson's previous works on gender and race will [End Page 195] not be disappointed as she extends race and gender to midwestern preferences for northern border regions as well as to the unlikely casting of racial stereotypes onto livestock. Foremost, Hoganson attacks the notion of an insular Midwest that somehow protected quintessential American values. By concentrating on agricultural markets in chapters two through five, Hoganson thoroughly details the ways in which Midwesterners concerned themselves with national and global politics. From the transfer of German tiling technology that drained midwestern marshes to the competition of midwestern pork in British markets, Hoganson argues that Midwesterners were anything but static or insular. This point shines brightest in diplomatic histories of chapter four. She deploys trade journals, letters, and government publications to link populist movement agricultural politics to European imperialism. Using the University of Illinois in Urbana, Hoganson reveals the ground-level experiences of students and faculty who found themselves entangled in imperial webs. The faculty, hoping to cultivate imperial relationships to grow the global importance of Illinois agriculture, pulled agricultural knowledge from European colonial experiments. Meanwhile, British colonial subjects attending the university carved out a place of acceptance in an otherwise culturally narrow-minded community in order to gain a world-class agricultural education. In chapters two and three, Hoganson contributes to borderlands history and racial studies through her examination of cattle and Berkshire hog markets. While examining the economic ties of commodities to the British empire, she also reveals the deeply entrenched racism held by many who participated in the American hog and cattle markets. The Heartland reveals how Americans attached racial and gender stereotypes to both cattle and hogs, often seeing the imports from the South with "Mexican" and "African" heritage as inferior, while praising livestock originating from Canada as superior. Because Midwesterners perpetuated and profited from these ideas, Hoganson casts "the Midwest as a place where borderlands converged" (75). Hoganson begins and ends the book with the ideas of settlement and displacement. The Heartland moves beyond popular notions that Europeans pushed Native American groups, specifically the Kickapoo, from the area in order to domesticate, cultivate, and settle the land. Rather, chapter one posits that while settlements formed and White encroachers did push the Kickapoo out of Illinois, the new Champaign population continued to be quite mobile. Throughout the book, Hoganson traces the Kickapoo [End Page 196] through multiple removals by the U.S. government and encroaching newcomers. In her last chapter, we find the Kickapoo in their most recent forced relocation, situated on the U.S.-Mexican border. Here they battled for access to basic human rights, including the ability to move freely across their territory that straddles the Rio Grande River. With these bookends, Hoganson underscores two major currents of imperialism: invasion of a foreign land and the injustices imposed on its inhabitants. With these twin threads, she simultaneously dispels ideas that midwestern "settlers" earned their right to the land through settlement and that the largest threat to American ideals came from foreigners. While the analytical framework of the book is strong, chapter five lacks the tight structure of preceding chapters. Seeking to address popular theoretical analyses of the environment through meteorology...