WHY THE MIDWEST MATTERS

Abstract

Recounting these reasons that Midwest mattered to course of historical events is not an exercise in assembling Slept Here-style factoids or in regional chauvinism, but all exercise aimed at broadening our sense of nation's component parts, and demonstrating why, in particular, one understudied region deserves more consideration from historians and how this region's history can help us see totality of our national past. ********** THE HISTORIAN FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER concentrated his work on forces and moments that mattered in American past and his focus yielded essays on of Western frontier, nation's varied regions, advancement of democratic institutions and attitudes, influence of pioneer heritage, and even evolution of historical writing itself. In an age of cascading data and detailed micro-histories, Turner's breadth of vision provides a welcome respite and offers a rare sense of perspective to a world drowning in information but parched of its relevance. Even a critic such as Richard Hofstadter admired Turner because he eschewed monograph with its minute investigation of details and its massing of footnotes and because he spoke to big questions about nation's history (73). While Turner supported research on smaller component parts of American history and fully understood how critical these efforts were to historical work, he never lost sight of bigger picture and need to explain to a broader audience significance of his studies. For a revival of Midwestern history to be possible, approach of Turner must be embraced: historians must first explain why this history matters on broader canvass of human affairs. If they do so, they will have much to report. The Midwest matters, in short, because it helps explain course of foundational events in North America, origins of American Revolution, political and social foundations of American republic, outcome of Civil War, and emergence of United States as a world power that shaped global events. The Midwest reveals evolution of interior resistance to coastal dominance of polities and culture, which begat forms of populism that still persist and resonate in American political culture, and explains history of capitalism in United States, over which debate will long endure. American Indians, who were deeply involved in formative military clashes in Midwest, were pushed farther West by pioneer settlers and African-Americans, who sought an escape from South, increasingly chose Midwest as their home beginning in twentieth century. The Midwest's influence on course of American and global history began in colonial American backcountry. By middle of eighteenth-century, New France controlled Canada, Louisiana, and Mississippi Valley and dominated Great Lakes region while British colonies lined East coast of what is now United States. When French began to fortify their holdings and British traders and settlers started moving into interior or future site of American Midwest, frictions along frontier border of French and British empires followed. In 1754, worried about French encroachment on its Western flank, colony of Virginia dispatched 21-year-old major George Washington to displace a fort on Ohio River and to signal to French it would defend its frontier. Washington returned in defeat, but his failed expedition set in motion train of events that would lead to a global conflict between France and England, which included a war for American backcountry, or Midwest. By sparking what Winston Churchill called the first world war, frontier settlers in Midwest served as proximate cause of liquidation of France's New World empire, Britain's acquisition of Midwest, and later birth of American republic. …