What lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn’t.

But the charge that Shreve McCannon laid upon Quentin Compson  can be laid upon any historian of any place in any era.  Even the Midwest, as Jon Lauck would certainly agree. He’s the author of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900. The last time he was on the podcast was way back in Episode 13, when we talked about his manifesto The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History.

For Further Investigation

We haven't had that many talks about the Midwest, or its people; but recently we talked about South Dakota with Jon Lauck's friend and neighbor Ben Jones. Much farther in the rear view mirror is a conversation with Jane Simonsen about Black Hawk, chief of the Saux and Meskwaki tribes, which involved the forced removal of those people from the lands in the Midwest.

The Midwestern History Association

The Midwestern History Association has a journal, the Middle West Review; and a podcast, Heartland History

Was the Midwest the American Boeotia? There's a comparative history question for you.

Episode 294: Black Suffrage

The Town That Started the Civil War was mentioned in the course of the conversation; the book for children or teens I was thinking of is The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery

One book to read about Oberlin, Ohio as a utopian community that failed is Elusive Utopia, which focuses on Oberlin after the Civil War

I was trying to remember Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, which focuses on Villisca's Company F (which is the only company in the Iowa National Guard to build its own armory with funds raised from the local community) as well as other units from southwest Iowa that served in the battles for North Africa.

Know Your Memes: "This is Fine"