IN THE FALL OF 2014, historians gathered at the Northern Great Plains History Conference voted to create the Midwest History Association (MHA), a culmination of ongoing discussions and projects to revitalize Midwest regional studies. The MHA sponsors annual conferences and publishes Middle West Review through the University of Nebraska Press. One of the principal figures in this renaissance of midwestern studies is Jon Lauck, who received his PhD in history from the University of Iowa and JD from the University of Minnesota Law School. Lauck taught at the University of South Dakota and served as a senior advisor to Senator John Thune of South Dakota. He has published several works on midwestern history, including Finding a New Midwestern History (2008), The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (2013), and From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965 (2017), and is working on a new set of essays on the new midwestern history for publication by the University of Illinois Press. He is past president of the MHA and serves on its board as well as edits Middle West Review. Lauck is the 2021 recipient of the MHA's Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Achievement in Midwestern History.The renewed interest in Midwest regional studies has increasingly played a role in American history as well as the focus on state historical societies and their publications, such as our own ISHS and Journal. The following interview is intended to introduce our subscribers to the nature of Midwest regional studies and renewed interest in midwestern history, especially in its applicability for those of us in the Prairie State. JISHS: Professor Lauck, thank you for agreeing to participate in this discussion of midwestern regional history, its revival, and relationship to Illinois state history. You have studied law, history, and economics and have served in public affairs. How did your interest in history, especially midwestern history, develop, and how might your various professional experiences correlate with that interest in history?JL: The fundamental reason is that I'm a midwesterner. I grew up on a farm in eastern South Dakota, which is the midwestern side of South Dakota, not the western side, past the Missouri River, which is more high plains, like Wyoming and Montana. East River South Dakota, as it is called, is the classic agrarian Midwest, like Iowa. For those interested in the line between the western Midwest and the beginning of the plains West, see the recent book The Interior Borderlands (2019). My early books were about the agrarian politics of the Midwest and later campaign battles in the Midwest. The specific point at which I began to study the Midwest as a region was when—as a result of teaching duties at South Dakota State University—I wrote a book about Dakota Territory. I noticed that all those Dakota settlers were coming in from the Midwest and I wanted to know more about what those migrants brought in terms of their history. When I found there wasn't much written history to draw on, I started digging. This was Year Zero. While I had been working in a space that could be considered midwestern history prior to this, my work was probably more geared toward agricultural and political and economic and legal history. With my research for The Lost Region, I actually began focusing on midwestern history as a category of analysis or using it as an organizing principle.JISHS: Your book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965 (2017) was warmly received. In fact, former NBC news anchor and fellow South Dakotan Tom Brokaw wrote that the book “is a long overdue defense and celebration of midwestern literature, culture, and history against the starchy criticism of eastern elites.” Would you explain this declension of midwestern regional prominence and was this declension principally literary in character or also seen in historical scholarship?JL: The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was what I call The Midwestern Moment (see the essay collection published in 2017 by the same name). The Midwest had emerged as the nation's most populous region, it sent its heroes to serve as president, its economy was a powerhouse, and places like California and Florida were barely blips and the South was weak, war-torn, and poor. At this time, the Midwest found its voice by way of prominent regional authors and artists and an impressive regionalist movement. Fitzgerald called the region the “warm center of the world,” and I quite loved that phrase. But then the Midwest lost its centrality to American life. World War II, the Cold War, cosmopolitan urges, the boom of the West and Florida, and the diminished importance of farming and manufacturing hurt the Midwest. Both midwestern literary regionalism and historical studies went into eclipse. The Mississippi Valley Historical Association was founded in Nebraska and had been based in the Midwest, but in the 1960s it became a national organization and lost its regional roots. The Midwest became the only American region without a historical studies association, which is quite shocking when you think about it. To answer your question, yes, the Midwest also lost its footing in historical scholarship. I devote a chapter to this in From Warm Center to Ragged Edge.JISHS: Your scholarship and those of colleagues in the field appear to have branched into advocacy by 2013–2014, when the first informal organizing of what became the Midwest Historical Association (MHA) began. Was the organizational development of the MHA the work of a few isolated voices or did you find a ready cohort of scholars interested in reviving the field?JL: It took me some time to formulate my thoughts on all of this. It seemed unbelievable, as I mentioned above, that the Midwest didn't have a dedicated historical studies organization. It seemed so unbelievable that I thought I needed to research the question, analyze the old journals and other organs of regionalism, and see what happened. I collected my thoughts in my book The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (2013). I had no idea if anyone else would care about this glaring omission in our history or if this book would just be a one-off and dismissed as a statement of the obvious but unfixable. My good friend the historian John E. Miller worried that I would never find a publisher for such an arcane book, one discussing the diminishing historiography of the Midwest. But the University of Iowa Press bit, with some help from a positive endorsement from the historian Richard White, who began his career in Michigan and understood the problem of the absence of midwestern history (he subtly noted the importance of the Midwest in parts of his 2017 book The Republic for Which It Stands). Anyway, in the summer of 2013 I started asking around about all this and invited people to discuss the matter in the bar of a hotel where we were meeting for the Northern Great Plains History Association. It turned out that people were interested, so we began building a new historical society.JISHS: Would you describe the operations of the MHA, its publications and conferences, as well as its relationships with the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians?JL: The idea in the early stages was to see if there would be enough support to sustain a stand-alone organization. We had some listening sessions at other conferences and decided there was a fair amount of support. Then I met Gleaves Whitney at a conference in Michigan, and he was very enthused about the new Midwestern History Association and he agreed to host our conferences at Grand Valley State University. It was an amazing bit of happenstance the young MHA got lucky. From just thirty-five attendees, the conference grew to more than 150 participants and is still going strong. I tried to record some of the details of these early years so the history did not get lost.1 The other key step was to organize scholarly journals so that people active in the field can publish their work. I began organizing the journal Middle West Review and in another bit of luck the University of Nebraska Press agreed to become our publisher, so the journal is still very active and publishing a lot of thinking about the field. In addition to being a hard copy printed journal, it is available on Project Muse, which is critical. I was also the editor of an online journal titled Studies in Midwestern History for a while. Studies published some very interesting work, but I was simply too busy and needed to pass it along to some other scholars. Alas, it appears to have gone silent. As I've studied regionalism, I've come to learn about many old journals that did not make it, but I believe it is still worth trying. Seeds need to be planted. Maybe some ambitious young scholars will revive Studies in future years. Anyway, to answer your question, in the early years of the MHA, I came to know Jon Butler, the Yale historian of religion who, as luck would have it, was from a little town in Minnesota and thus interested in midwestern history. When he was president of the Organization of American Historians, he was extremely helpful to the MHA and made us an affiliate. So too with the American Historical Association, whose executive director, Jim Grossman, worked for many years at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He also made us an affiliate of AHA and so midwestern historians get special slots at the OAH and AHA these days so we can spread the word about our work.JISHS: Does the MHA have any formal or informal ties with state historical societies or preservation agencies? If so, how do those operate, and, if not, do you see potential partnerships with such organizations?JL: Not that I'm aware of, except that many people from state historical societies and journals in the Midwest attend the MHA conference, which has fostered more collaboration. Stronger and more formal partnerships seem like a great idea to me!JISHS: One of the questions those unfamiliar with midwestern regional history might have (as, in fact, did I when first becoming aware of the field) is how do scholars define the region? In other words, how does one approach a region stretching from the Old Northwest Territory, which included, of course, Illinois, through the Great Plains states of Nebraska and the Dakotas?JL: This is something that we're working on. As I mentioned, there is a new book about the western boundary of the Midwest titled The Interior Borderlands. There is also a new book, for which I just signed a contract, about the northern reaches of the Midwest. Gleaves Whitney and I are also working with Kent State University Press on a book about the eastern Midwest, or roughly eastern Ohio, and the divide between the East and the Midwest. This year I hope to begin work on a book on the biggest and most distinctive of the Midwest's boundaries, that with the South. Illinois, of course, will figure prominently in such a work given how far down into the South that Illinois protrudes. It's an ongoing, big-picture project to map the boundaries of the Midwest. If people can't wait, however, they should think in terms of the twelve traditional midwestern states with certain modifications such as slicing off the western half of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas and using some nuance with the region near the Ohio River, which shades into Appalachia and Southern-ness. It is an important discussion and one that will remain at the heart of midwestern studies.JISHS: For Illinoisans, how do you see scholars of midwestern history perceiving this state's distinct historical identity and traditions?JL: Illinois has been at the heart of the Midwest for a long time. Lincoln led the midwestern-born Republican Party to its first victory in a presidential race. Chicago is often seen as the cultural capital of the Midwest and has obviously been its core economic hub for much of its history. Bill Cronon mapped out the key relationships between Chicago and the broader Midwest in Nature's Metropolis, but we need more work in this area. As impressive and long-standing as Cronon's work has been, it largely stands alone. That book came out in 1991, more than three decades ago. It is largely remembered as a key work in the rise of environmental history, although it is obviously a core work on midwestern history. The book, I think, is a reminder that we need more foundational books to build our field around, especially books that are directly focused on the Midwest as a region.JISHS: Finally, where do you see the field developing from here? What would be your advice to contemporary and future scholars of midwestern history?JL: I think that we have made great strides over the past decade. The creation of a scholarly association, an annual meeting, and a scholarly journal are critical and essential steps to reviving the field of midwestern history. I think we're on our way. The next crucial steps, in my view, are to persuade a few Big Ten schools, or perhaps Notre Dame or the University of Chicago, to hire historians who specialize in midwestern history, or will at least teach a seminar in this area and direct dissertations on such topics. I think the people of Michigan or Minnesota would want the history departments of their flagship universities to have someone who can teach classes about the history of their region. Alas, this hasn't been a priority for decades. Stephen Kantrowitz told me they don't even teach midwestern history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the home of Frederick Jackson Turner and the early days of midwestern history. If we can make the case to the right people, I think it's possible this situation might change. It is time for the heavy hitters to help out the cause. This revival effort needs to move from the stage of guerrilla organizing to a more advanced stage of development where it enjoys greater institutional support. Also, I think we need a few more key books to help shape the field. As you might expect, given my great interest in all of this, I've been working on a book that attempts to explain the broad parameters of midwestern history for the region's first century. I hope that this book, currently titled The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900, will be out within the next year or so. More generally, we just need more books published about the Midwest. I'm working with Indiana University Press to develop a series titled Heartland History to create another space for various midwestern voices to be heard. Whether in the form of new books or other ventures, I think an important area of focus is the subregions of the Midwest. These are particular areas, like the Driftless or the Iron Range, or perhaps river valleys, which have a cohesive identity and are squarely within the Midwest and need attention. I think a good example is a book I am editing for publication by the Center for Western Studies titled Heartland River: A Cultural and Environmental History of the Big Sioux River Valley (2022), about an important midwestern riverine artery that has never been subject to a book-length treatment. This book highlights a new and emerging interest of mine—the environmental history of the Midwest. This particular topic will allow midwestern history to partner with a large and active field of history that is important to us all. To advance this cause, we're planning a special issue of Middle West Review focused on the region's environmental history. Lastly, we need a generous donor—perhaps Warren Buffet in Omaha or the Meijers of Michigan—to endow a foundation dedicated to midwestern studies that funds research fellowships and provides subventions for important works on midwestern history. Such a foundation could also fund a well-designed and expertly edited monthly titled something like the Midwestern Review of Books that is on par with the New York Review of Books (NYRB) or the LA Review of Books (LARB). The Midwest Review of Books could publish essays and reviews about all topics, of course, just like NYRB or LARB, but it would be sure to target books and topics of particular interest to the Midwest and develop a midwestern sensibility, or prioritize nuance, balance, and rationality, eschew sensationalism and the “shocking the squares” mentality of some publications, and tap a deep vein of regionalist energy which is healthy for the republic.JISHS: Jon, we appreciate your time and cooperation. We look forward to forthcoming scholarship from you and your colleagues at the MHA and hope that our subscribers and others interested in Illinois history will take advantage of opportunities afforded by MHA publications and meetings to share state history with broader scholarly and public audiences.
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