The American Midwest : essays on regional history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The American Midwest : essays on regional history
（Midwestern history and culture）
Indiana University Press, c2001
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Papers from a conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Oct. 1998
Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-238) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In a series of often highly personal essays, the authors - all of whom are experts on various aspects of Midwestern history - consider the question of regional identity as a useful way of thinking about the history of the American Midwest. They begin with the assumption that Midwesterners have never been as consciously regional as Western or Southern Americans. They note the peculiar absence of the Midwest from the recent revival of interest in American regionalism among both scholars and journalists. Drawing on personal experiences as well as a wide variety of scholarship, the authors hope to stimulate readers into thinking more concretely about what it has meant to be from the Midwest - and why Midwesterners have traditionally been less assertive about their regional identity than other Americans. They suggest that the best place to find Midwesternness is in the stories the residents of the region have told about themselves and each other. Being Midwestern is mostly a state of mind. It is always fluid, always contested, always being renegotiated.
Even the most frequent objection to the existence of Midwestern identity, the fact that no one can agree on its borders, is part of a larger regional conversation about the ways in which Midwesterners imagine themselves and their relationships with other Americans.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents Acknowledgments Andrew L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray, "The Story of the Midwest: An Introduction" Mary Neth, "Seeing the Midwest with Peripheral Vision: Identities, Narratives, and Region" Eric Hinderaker, "Liberating Contrivances: Narrative and Identity in Ohio Valley Histories" John Lauritz Larson, "Pigs in Space, or What Shapes American Regional Cultures?" Nicole Etcheson, "Barbecued Kentuckians and Six-Foot Texas Rangers: The Construction of Midwestern Identity" Kathleen N. Conzen, "Piing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwestern Regionality" Kenneth Winkle, "'The Great Body of the Republic': Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of a Middle West" Susan E. Gray, "Stories Written in the Blood: Race, Identity, and the Middle West" Andrew R. L. Cayton, "The Anti-region: Place and identity in the History of the American Middle West" R. Douglas Hurt, "Midwestern Distinctiveness" Jon Gjerde, "Middleness and the Middle West"
by "Nielsen BookData"