American Heartland Research Articles

Matachines in the Midwest: Religion and Identity in the American Heartland

This article examines how a community of recent Mexican migrants and their families use popular religious practices to sustain a sense of ethnic Mexican identity in a predominantly White rural Catholic Church where their growing presence and influence are changing how Catholicism is practiced. In this rural setting, participation in a Matachines dance tradition functions to bring the Mexican community together, place before them a common tradition uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions in them around ritual traditions which in turn serve as a pillar of strength for maintaining their ethnic identity through the perpetuation of religious practices and symbols. More specifically, two dimensions are of central focus in this article: tensions arising from ethnic expressions through the institutional Church and the contested meanings of specific rituals and religious symbols such as Matachines and La Virgen de Guadalupe. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this research presents evidence of a modern transformation of U.S. religious practices as a result of immigration from Mexico into the Midwestern United States.

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in the American Heartland by Stephen E. Towne (review)

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in the American Heartland by Stephen E. Towne (review)

“A New Day Has Dawned for the UNIA”: Garveyism, the Diasporic Midwest, and West Africa, 1920–80

Abstract This article examines the diasporic political linkages between the U.S. Midwest and West Africa through the largely unknown encounters of James R. Stewart, William L. Sherrill, and Clarence W. Harding, Jr., on the continent. They were leaders in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) founded by Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey. During its heyday in the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed six million members worldwide, including in the American heartland and West Africa. Stewart of Cleveland, Ohio, emigrated to Liberia in 1949. Sherrill of Detroit, Michigan, attended the 1957 independence ceremonies in Ghana, whereas Harding of Chicago, Illinois, moved to Liberia in 1966 and built a dynamic, grassroots Garvey movement in the West African nation. Their sojourns to the continent extend the analytical, geographic, and temporal parameters of the history of West Africa and the black diaspora through tracing the transnational linkages between the American heartland and continent, the gendered contours and paradoxes of Pan-Africanism, and the endurance and uneven results of Garveyism in Africa from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll: the rise of America's 1960s counterculture

Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll: The American Counterculture of 1960s offers a unique examination of cultural flowering that enveloped United States during that early postwar decade. Robert C. Cottrell provides an enthralling view of counterculture, beginning with an examination of American bohemia, Lyrical Left of pre-WWII era, and hipsters. He delves into Beats, before analyzing counterculture that emerged on both East and West coasts, but soon cropped up in American heartland as well. Cottrell delivers something of a collective biography, through an exploration of antics of seminal countercultural figures Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. Cottrell also presents fascinating chapters covering the magic elixir of sex, rock 'n roll, underground press, Haight-Ashbury, literature that garnered attention of many in counterculture, Monterey Pop, Summer of Love, Death of Hippie, March on Pentagon, communes, Yippies, Weatherman, Woodstock, Manson family, women's movement, and decade's legacies.

“Hiroshima Is Peanuts”: The Strange Landscape of The Day After

Nicholas Meyer’s made-for-television movie The Day After (1983) depicts an apocalypse wrought by the exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union. This essay argues that the film, particularly in its representation of landscape, offers a series of surrealist touches that not only disrupt the aesthetics of 1980s made-for-television movies but that also complicate the film’s representation of the American heartland. Ostensibly “at stake” in the film’s nuclear exchange, and drawn using an assortment of patriotic clichés, the heartland becomes a site of instability, danger, and threatening destructiveness that challenges the logic of the late Cold War.

Farewell to the Grande Dame of Arab American Social History: Reflections on My Debt to Alixa Naff

Among the many ways to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Dr. Alixa Naff, mine is best expressed as personal reflections on how her friendship and collaboration shaped my career and the emerging field of Arab American studies.My entree into the ethnic arena began in the mid-1970s at the American University of Beirut (AUB). As a graduate student in AUB's new program of Middle East Studies, I was introduced to the history and sociology of the region, which indirectly drew my attention to the major emigration from Greater Syria to the USA that began a century earlier. As a third-generation Arab American, I was curious about the social, economic, and religious integration into the USA of the early Arabic-speaking immigrants, and chose, almost by accident, an English-language literary journal published by Salloum Mokarzel (my maternal grandfather) in the 1920s. The Syrian World was dedicated to the American-born children of Syrian immigrants to foster appreciation of and pride in their cultural heritage, and also to encourage national dialogue about the process of becoming American.A decade earlier, in the summer of 1962, Alixa Naff-armed with a history degree from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a tape recorder, and a grant from the university's Folklore Department-set out to collect oral histories of Arab Americans. Her sojourn into the American heartland to capture memories and collect artifacts of the first generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants (1880-1940) set Alixa on a lifelong path of documenting, contextualizing, and preserving the stories of these pioneers.By the time I was completing my master's thesis on the structural and ideological transition of immigrant families from this first wave, there was a burgeoning interest, mostly among American scholars of Arab descent, in the experience of Arab American communities. American attention to race and ethnicity, both in academe and popular culture, was expanding to include groups too small or too invisible (or both) to have warranted the focus of scholarship. Ethnic journals and monograph senes began including content on Arab Americans, itself a relatively new identity, fueled by increasing numbers of immigrants from the newly independent Arab states whose political, cultural, and religious experiences often differed from those of the pioneers, and laid the bases for new ethnic institutions and social formations that were more engaged in the public square.When Alixa returned in the 1980s to the communities she first visited to formalize her research (and the collection of artifacts that would comprise the archive she donated to the National Museum of American History in 1984), Arab American identity had taken root by way of national organizations, networks in support of Palestinian rights, and professional associations that drew largely from American-educated Arabs, but also from the more politicized segments of the pioneer wave's second and third generations. My own induction in the field of Arab American affairs was shaped more by my exposure to the contemporary Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, learning Arabic, and by membership in organizations such as the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) than by the history of my immigrant forbears or the ethnic patrimony they left behind.Reading Alixa's book Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience, meeting her professionally and being exposed to the Naff collection were unexpected sources of joy. The curiosity nurtured by my graduate years of poring over six years of The Syrian World and imagining my parents' generation's struggle with traditionalism, national identity, ignorance, and xenophobia was reignited by Alixa's seminal work. Alixa encouraged me to locate family photos and artifacts for the Arab American archive. My ethnic professional life, steeped in politics, intolerance, and the needs of modern-day immigrants, was tempered and soothed by taking time to focus on personal history, looking back through a prism of intimacy and wonder. …

Gentrification in the American heartland? Evidence from Oklahoma City

Past research on gentrification has focused overwhelmingly on older, postindustrial cities, bypassing urban areas with other morphologies and demographic characteristics. In this paper, we address this gap by applying the analytical tools used to examine gentrification in postindustrial cities to a less conventional setting: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, a younger, sprawling, mid-sized American city. In 1993, voters passed a sales tax initiative designed to transform Bricktown, a depopulated rail and manufacturing neighborhood near the city’s center. This study examines the subsequent physical and cultural makeover of the area surrounding Bricktown by analyzing traditional gentrification variables, like income, household size, property values, and education. To these indicators, we add several additional variables, including business and restaurant types, which help illustrate shifting consumer preferences and the spatial change in businesses aimed at people in different income brackets.

Nineteenth-century butchery and transport for a market economy: Plum Grove as a case study for commercial transactions in the Midwestern USA

ABSTRACT Archaeozoologists have long examined the relationships between butchery and consumption sites. When applied to historic sites, this distinction between the location of butchery and places of consumption can be informative regarding market economy, long-distance trade and transport using increasingly modern technologies, and the necessity for urban areas to be fed by more rural regions. This paper will explore the archaeozoological markers of participation in a long-distance market economy through the faunal remains from a bone bed deposited in the late 19th century at the Plum Grove Historic Farm, a site located in the American heartland. The faunal remains here suggest that the site's occupants were involved in a nationwide system providing meat products, likely by refrigerated rail, to an ever growing population in eastern USA.

AgTech: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Growth

In this white paper, we provide an overview of a new emerging economic sector: sustainable agricultural technology or, more simply, “AgTech.” This sector has the potential to completely reshape global agriculture, dramatically increasing the productivity of the agriculture system while reducing the environmental and social costs of current ag production practices. Given that we must produce more food in the next forty years than during the entire course of human history to date, and must do so on a planet showing signs of severe environmental stress, AgTech innovations will be absolutely essential. We believe humanity can rise to the occasion and overcome these monumental global challenges, but to do so will require sustained attention, significant investment, and AgTech-specific entrepreneur support systems to help spur innovation in the field.Our purpose in writing this paper is threefold. First, we seek to increase awareness of the productivity and sustainability challenges of the food system and inspire entrepreneurs to enter the field. Total demand is expected to rise 70 percent by 2050, and current growth rates in agriculture are not sufficient to meet this goal. However, the ag sector faces an even greater challenge because of the uncertainty posed by climate change on future production and constraints posed by the limited availability of land, water, and other key resources. These twin challenges of productivity and sustainability translate to countless opportunities for innovation across the complete value chain, from inputs and agricultural production to transport, processing, distribution, storage, and waste disposal. Visionary entrepreneurs will have the ability to solve pressing societal challenges while capturing the economic value of their new AgTech products and processes.Our second purpose is to help increase the flow of capital to investments in AgTech. The agriculture sector as a whole is one of the world’s largest economic sectors, with net farm income of around $120 billion and farm assets at around $2 trillion with little leverage. Yet there has been relatively little investment in AgTech compared with other industries like clean energy. Venture capital firms compiling portfolios of new AgTech companies are seeing more startups seeking funding than available capital, and other investor groups thus far have not entered the field in significant numbers. Given the size of the potential market and the vital societal need for agricultural innovation, we expect that investors soon will realize the opportunity of AgTech and invest substantially in this emerging field.Our third purpose is to highlight the need for regional AgTech entrepreneur support systems to accelerate innovation. We believe that the American heartland provides an ideal example of a region poised to make great strides forward in developing an entrepreneurial sector for AgTech. The heartland has some of the world’s best growing conditions and natural resources, and currently produces 27.2 percent of the world’s corn, 29.75 percent of its soybeans, 6.7 percent of its beef, and 6.9 percent of its pork, making this region an epicenter of global agricultural activity. The heartland houses some of largest and most progressive agricultural companies in the world, looked upon as leaders in their field. The heartland is blessed with highly developed transportation networks along its waterways and railroads, allowing for efficient logistics and transport of ag products. In addition, the heartland has world-class AgTech research capabilities with its land-grant universities and city-level clusters of expertise, such as plant sciences in St. Louis and animal sciences in Kansas City. Given the overall AgTech entrepreneurial activity in the region and the large number of significant multinational players, the American heartland can be a powerful influence in driving the objectives of the AgTech revolution. Taken together, these resources indicate a regional competitive advantage in AgTech, similar to what the Silicon Valley cluster has provided for the IT industry. For these reasons, we believe a concerted effort to develop a regional AgTech entrepreneurial support system will result in immense benefits for the region itself and set an example for other agricultural communities across the world.We hope this paper launches a larger dialogue on the monumental challenge of sustainable food production for the next forty years and opportunities for the AgTech sector to help solve this challenge. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas on these important topics.

AgTech: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Growth

In this white paper, we provide an overview of a new emerging economic sector: sustainable agricultural technology or, more simply, “AgTech.” This sector has the potential to completely reshape global agriculture, dramatically increasing the productivity of the agriculture system while reducing the environmental and social costs of current ag production practices. Given that we must produce more food in the next forty years than during the entire course of human history to date, and must do so on a planet showing signs of severe environmental stress, AgTech innovations will be absolutely essential. We believe humanity can rise to the occasion and overcome these monumental global challenges, but to do so will require sustained attention, significant investment, and AgTech-specific entrepreneur support systems to help spur innovation in the field.Our purpose in writing this paper is threefold. First, we seek to increase awareness of the productivity and sustainability challenges of the food system and inspire entrepreneurs to enter the field. Total demand is expected to rise 70 percent by 2050, and current growth rates in agriculture are not sufficient to meet this goal. However, the ag sector faces an even greater challenge because of the uncertainty posed by climate change on future production and constraints posed by the limited availability of land, water, and other key resources. These twin challenges of productivity and sustainability translate to countless opportunities for innovation across the complete value chain, from inputs and agricultural production to transport, processing, distribution, storage, and waste disposal. Visionary entrepreneurs will have the ability to solve pressing societal challenges while capturing the economic value of their new AgTech products and processes.Our second purpose is to help increase the flow of capital to investments in AgTech. The agriculture sector as a whole is one of the world’s largest economic sectors, with net farm income of around $120 billion and farm assets at around $2 trillion with little leverage. Yet there has been relatively little investment in AgTech compared with other industries like clean energy. Venture capital firms compiling portfolios of new AgTech companies are seeing more startups seeking funding than available capital, and other investor groups thus far have not entered the field in significant numbers. Given the size of the potential market and the vital societal need for agricultural innovation, we expect that investors soon will realize the opportunity of AgTech and invest substantially in this emerging field.Our third purpose is to highlight the need for regional AgTech entrepreneur support systems to accelerate innovation. We believe that the American heartland provides an ideal example of a region poised to make great strides forward in developing an entrepreneurial sector for AgTech. The heartland has some of the world’s best growing conditions and natural resources, and currently produces 27.2 percent of the world’s corn, 29.75 percent of its soybeans, 6.7 percent of its beef, and 6.9 percent of its pork, making this region an epicenter of global agricultural activity. The heartland houses some of largest and most progressive agricultural companies in the world, looked upon as leaders in their field. The heartland is blessed with highly developed transportation networks along its waterways and railroads, allowing for efficient logistics and transport of ag products. In addition, the heartland has world-class AgTech research capabilities with its land-grant universities and city-level clusters of expertise, such as plant sciences in St. Louis and animal sciences in Kansas City. Given the overall AgTech entrepreneurial activity in the region and the large number of significant multinational players, the American heartland can be a powerful influence in driving the objectives of the AgTech revolution. Taken together, these resources indicate a regional competitive advantage in AgTech, similar to what the Silicon Valley cluster has provided for the IT industry. For these reasons, we believe a concerted effort to develop a regional AgTech entrepreneurial support system will result in immense benefits for the region itself and set an example for other agricultural communities across the world.We hope this paper launches a larger dialogue on the monumental challenge of sustainable food production for the next forty years and opportunities for the AgTech sector to help solve this challenge. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas on these important topics.

Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters; Gretchen Heefner. The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland.

Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters; Gretchen Heefner. The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland.

Review: The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland, by Gretchen Heefner

Review: <i>The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland</i>, by Gretchen Heefner

The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland

Review of: Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland, by Gretchen Heefner.

Patterns of new drug emergence: A comment in light of ‘krokodil’

Philip Jenkins, in his estimable book “Synthetic Panics: the symbolic politics of designer drugs”, writes about the cycles of emergence and subsidence, as if in waves, of new or modified formulations of psychoactive substances. Almost invariably, these drugs emerge from obscurity in a few localities, are produced and used by an unknown but probably small number of experimenters, and then “exposed” by an intrepid reporter or two following up on information from a police or medical contact. Thereafter, the use expands and then most often quickly peaks. The rate at which the pattern unfolds seems to depend upon the ease of synthesis or acquisition, the market potential, and the appearance of relative benefit or adverse effects of its use. Faced with an emergence of a new drug, anti-drug authorities seize on a combination of strategies to reduce it expanding, using an almost standard characterization of the drug as the newest, greatest menace, likely to do more damage than the previous worst-ever drug it is seen to be displacing. The strategies include a mix of criminalization, control of the reactants in the synthesis or the possibilities for drug diversion or prescribing, demonization of the drug’s effects, and dehumanization of its users. Almost invariably, the drug is described as “the most dangerous drug yet”, worse than the previous most dangerous drug yet. And if the drug is being used by marginalized populations, the strategies take their harshest form. Reinerman and Levine demonstrate this point clearly in comparing free-base cocaine used by the rich and its commercialized form, crack, used by the urban poor and minorities (Reinerman & Levine, 2004). In the former case, drug treatment expanded; in the latter, criminal penalties were escalated, creating “…the most massive wave of imprisonment in the history of the United States” (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995; Reinerman & Levine, 2004). But the macro-level use patterns of drugs as they emerge and their use spreads often have a life of their own, defying efforts for control or receding to become historical footnotes without any assist from the authorities. A paradigmatic example of this approach to curtail and the counterintuitive effects of such efforts can be seen in the U.S. responses to reports of increasing methamphetamine use in the American heartland during the past decade. A parallel example can be seen in looking at the response to the emergence of krokodil use in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Comparison of these two patterns of drug emergence and spread reveals some interesting similarities and differences.

Perpetual States of Emergency: The Sexuality of Terrorism in Middle America

This article is a cultural analysis of the racial, sexual, and colonial aspects of homegrown terrorist assemblages in the American heartland. Applying Jasbir K. Puar's theories in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times to the 2008 remarks by Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern, who said that homosexuality is a worse threat than terrorism or Islam, this study illuminates how some conservative lawmakers declare states of emergency for political gain and to advance neoliberal policies. The article first reads Kern's nationally protested statements through the lens of Puar's work and in the context of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, then examines Kern's 2011 book as a narrative of white oppression grounded in an erasure of racism and imperialism, and concludes that her regular endorsement of emergency clauses in legislation corresponds with the apocalyptic temporality that characterizes her theological outlook. Even as it critically analyzes Kern's discourse and politics, this study cautions against reading her or the state she represents as retrograde, backward, or anti-modern, lest it perpetuates the spatiotemporal binaries that anchor civilizing missions and their homonationalist impulses.

The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland

The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland

Ada Louise Huxtable (1921–2013)

W hen Ada Louise Huxtable began her career at the New York Times in 1963, she was the first full-time architecture critic on an American newspaper. When she departed in 1981 for the next phase of her career—she was a member of the first class of MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellows—almost every major newspaper had an architecture critic either as a full-time staff member or as a regular contributor, and architecture had become a more conspicuous part of the broader cultural and civic discourse than ever before. Huxtable did not, to be sure, invent her profession, or single-handedly put architecture in the public eye. But no commentator on architecture, before or since, has had her degree of influence over the profession, or her impact on the public’s perception of the built environment. Huxtable’s years at the New York Times coincided with the growth of the historic preservation movement, to which she lent frequent support in the newspaper’s pages, giving preservation what was, in effect, the validation that would help it move into the cultural mainstream. At the same time, she was a passionate advocate of the new, and gave the general public what was, in many cases, its most cogent introduction to the work of architects she admired: I. M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, and Kallmann and McKinnell, to name several. She praised their work in memorable phrases such as her description of Meier’s Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana, as “a gleaming white structure that is as radical an addition to the American heartland as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie was to the French countryside at Poissy half a century ago.”1 Kahn’s library at Phillips Exeter Academy, she wrote, emerged out of “the architect’s remarkable, extremely personal, and very passionate love of all that is logical and beautiful …

The missile next door: the Minuteman in the American heartland

The missile next door: the Minuteman in the American heartland

Women's Perspectives on Ultrasound Viewing in the Abortion Care Context

PurposeIn recent years, states have passed a range of regulations regarding ultrasound procedures in abortion care. Abortion rights opponents have promoted ultrasound viewing, believing that women who view their own ultrasound images are likely to be dissuaded from abortion. Abortion rights advocates, in contrast, routinely oppose these regulations, citing concerns that ultrasound viewing in the abortion context will be emotionally difficult for women. However, no empirical research has examined the effects of ultrasound viewing in unwanted pregnancies. MethodsWe conducted in-depth interviews with 20 respondents who received an ultrasound as part of their abortion care in one of two states in the American heartland. Interview transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory and a matrix technique for discussion of ultrasound viewing and regulations about ultrasound viewing. ResultsRespondents’ accounts offer support for anti-abortion claims that ultrasound viewing can dissuade women from abortion, as well as support for abortion rights claims that viewing an ultrasound can cause emotional difficulty for a woman planning to abort. Interviews point to unexpected outcomes of ultrasound viewing, including reports that viewing better enabled respondents to cope with their abortion. ConclusionsUltrasound viewing does not have a singular effect. These data suggest that current assumptions about viewing effects are inaccurate, or at the least incomplete. We do not find support for legislating mandatory ultrasound viewing in abortion care. Questions about clinical care practices are best address in the medical context, not the legislative arena.

The Making of a Black Liturgy: Pentecostal Worship and Spirituality from African Slave Narratives to American Cityscapes

Despite persistent claims that Pentecostalism is characterized by a Black, oral liturgy, little research has been done on its origin, character, or development. This article suggests that a Black liturgy is an adequate description for the contributions of Pentecostal communities to a uniquely American liturgy, one that is characterized both by its sensitivities to existing liturgical traditions and rejection of established ritual structures, as well as by its exposure to certain key events that have shaped the religious history of modern America. The argument expands on the hypothesis that from the plantation prayer grounds of African slaves and the camp meetings of the American South, an African American spirituality was carried to the urban centers of the American heartland. In this new location it was shaped by the social, cultural, and religious conditions of the new environment and emerged as a new liturgical form labeled "Pentecostal," which in its sensitivities was uniquely American. The critical impact of a Black liturgy in and beyond this American context, therefore, has to be reevaluated.