Heartland History

Camden and Phil have a wide-ranging conversation about the Midwest as a place and as an idea, focusing particuarly on Phil's lastest book Midwest Futures available from Belt Publishing (https://beltpublishing.com/products/midwest-futures). From the Publisher:

The Midwest: Is it middle? Or is it Western? As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic, critically acclaimed essay collection, these and other ambiguities might well be the region's defining characteristic. Deftly combining history, criticism, and memoir, Christman breaks his exploration of midwestern identity, past and present, into a suite of thirty-six brief, interconnected essays. Ranging across material questions of religion, race, class, climate, and Midwestern myth making, the result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

Camden and Dr. Benjamin Park discuss Dr. Park's book "Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier."

From the Publisher:

In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.

https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631494864

Guest, Dr. Brandon Ward who is the author of the recent study "Living Detroit Environmental Activism in an Age of Urban Crisis" (Routledge 2021) has a wide-ranging conversation with Camden about the ways environmental concerns were inseparable from issues related to housing, civil rights, suburbanization, organized labor, and deindustrialization in Detroit. Dr. Ward also draws attention to the opportunities that greater awareness of this legacy in contemporary political discourse creates for Detroiters.

From the publisher: In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life.

Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and physical decay – in short, it has become the poster child for the urban crisis. This is not a place in which one would expect to discover a history of vibrant expressions of environmentalism; however, in the post-World War II era, while suburban, middle-class homeowners organized into a potent force to protect the natural settings of their communities, in the working-class industrial cities and in the inner city, Detroiters were equally driven by the impulse to conserve their neighborhoods and create a more livable city, pushing back against the forces of deindustrialization and urban crisis. Living Detroit juxtaposes two vibrant and growing fields of American history which often talk past each other: environmentalism and the urban crisis. By putting the two subjects into conversation, we gain a richer understanding of the development of environmental activism and politics after World War II and its relationship to the crisis of America’s cities.

https://www.routledge.com/Living-Detroit-Environmental-Activism-in-an-Age-of-Urban-Crisis/Ward/p/book/9780367334420

This episode, Camden sits down with Edward E. Curtis IV who is the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of Liberal Arts &

Professor of Religious Studies at IUPUI. Dr. Curtis discusses his most recent book, Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (New York University Press).

From the publisher: "The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them.

Edward E. Curtis IV, a descendant of Syrian Midwesterners, vividly portrays the intrepid men and women who busted sod on the short-grass prairies of the Dakotas, peddled needles and lace on the streets of Cedar Rapids, and worked in the railroad car factories of Michigan City. This intimate portrait follows the stories of individuals such as farmer Mary Juma, pacifist Kassem Rameden, poet Aliya Hassen, and bookmaker Kamel Osman from the early 1900s through World War I, the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and World War II. Its story-driven approach places Syrian Americans at the center of key American institutions like the assembly line, the family farm, the dance hall, and the public school, showing how the first two generations of Midwestern Syrians created a life that was Arab, Muslim, and American, all at the same time.

Muslims of the Heartland recreates what the Syrian Muslim Midwest looked, sounded, felt, and smelled like—from the allspice-seasoned lamb and rice shared in mosque basements to the sound of the trains on the Rock Island Line rolling past the dry goods store. It recovers a multicultural history of the American Midwest that cannot be ignored."

https://nyupress.org/9781479812561/muslims-of-the-heartland/

On this edition of Heartland History, Camden is joined by Dr. Molly Rozum of the University of South Dakota to discuss her new book Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies.

From the University of Nebraska Press: "In Grasslands Grown Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region.

As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation.

Rozum argues that environmental awareness, including its ecological and cultural aspects, is key to forming a sense of place and a regional identity. The two concepts overlap and reinforce each other: place is more local, ecological, and emotional-sensual, and region is more ideational, national, and geographic in tone. This captivating study examines the growth of place and regional identities as they took shape within generations and over the life cycle."

You can find Dr. Rozum's book here, https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803285767/ or through independent book sellers.

This episode, Camden sits down with Dr. Lynne Heasley,

Professor of Environment and Sustainability at WMU to discuss her new book "The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes" (2021). Dr. Heasley's book is available through Michigan State University Press https://msupress.org/9781611864076/the-accidental-reef-and-other-ecological-odysseys-in-the-great-lakes/ or your local independent bookseller.

In this episode, Camden has a conversation with Professor Kristy Nabhan-Warren, who is the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair in Catholic Studies Departments of Religious Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, about her latest published research, "Meat Packing America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland" (2021). The book is available directly from UNC Press (https://uncpress.org/book/9781469663494/meatpacking-america/) or from your local bookseller.

Heartland History is back! We are thrilled to host a conversation with guest Dr. Dana Caldemeyer, Associate Professor of History at South Georgia State College. Dr. Caldemeyer talks with our new host Dr. Camden Burd about her new book "Union Renegades: Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age" (2021)published by the University of Illinois Press. Their conversation covers the tangled relationship of miners in the Midwest to labor organizations and to the corporate entities that employed them.

If you are interested in Dr. Caldemeyer's book, follow this link or order a copy from your local independent bookseller: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/39dem6cr9780252043505.html

Jillian Marie Jacklin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History interviews Sergio González who is the Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the Departments of History and of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Marquette University. Jacklin and González discuss his 2017 book "Mexicans in Wisconsin" published by the Wisconsin Historical Society, the vital importance of studying the past and present patterns of immigration in the Midwest (particularly in Milwaukee), as well as the political components of research on immigrant communities and citizenship in the contemporary cultural moment.

In addition to his 2017 book and his teaching, Dr. González serves on the editorial board of "Wisconsin 101: Our History in Objects" and is working on “Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest,” an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Humanities Without Walls consortium-funded project.

Jillian Jacklin studies labor and working-class history with an emphasis on U.S. social movements and political activism. Her research and teaching interests include cultural and carceral studies, critical race theory, economic and industrial relations, gender studies, and the history of American capitalism. She has published work in the Journal of Folklore Research and has two articles forthcoming in the International Journal of Cuban Studies.

Guest contributor Professor Katie Day Good of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio interviews Professor Kathryn Remlinger, author of Yooper Talk: Dialect as Identity in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, published by the University of Wisconsin Press (2017). Professor Remlinger — in addition to helpfully explaining what a “Yooper” is! — discusses her work with linguistic identity in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the methodology behind her research, the history of settlement in the region, the immigrant populations that shaped the region economically, culturally, and linguistically, and the varieties of English dialects that emerged in the region.