Heartland History

For the 40th episode of the podcast, Jon talks with Liesl Olson about her new book published by Yale University Press, titled "Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis" (2017). Olson is the Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry library and has taught at the University of Chicago, received fellowships from the National Endowment the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Newberry Library. Olson's first book Modernism and the Ordinary was published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

Jon interviews Steve Paul, a former Kansas City Star reporter and the author of “Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend,” published this month by Chicago Review Press. Paul discusses his work researching Hemingway, learning more about his connections to the Kansas City Star, and the importance of the Midwest to Hemingway’s identity and writing. Steve Paul will be speaking about “Hemingway at Eighteen” at the Iowa City Book Festival on at 2:30 PM on Saturday October 14th at the Iowa City Public Library.

Jon talks with author Melissa Fraterrigo, whose latest book titled "Glory Days" was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September of 2017. In the interview, Fraterrigo discusses growing up (and later living) all across the Midwest, how she became an author, and her love of teaching writing and literature as the current Director and as the Founder of the Lafayette Writers' Studio in Lafayette, Indiana.

One day away from Heartland History's one year anniversary, Jon talks about the background of the Iowa City Book Fair with John Kenyon, the Director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. They also discuss the festival this year, the literary past and present of Iowa City, and the importance of Iowa's designation as only one of twenty UNESCO Cities of Literature globally.

The Iowa City Book Festival runs from October 8th-15th.

Dr. Mark Soderstrom of SUNY Empire State College discusses his dissertation work on race, segregation, and housing at the University of Minnesota in the early 20th century, as well as an exhibit based on his research at the University of Minnesota's Elmer L. Andersen Library Atrium Gallery entitled "A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anti-Communists, Racism, and Anti-Semitism at the University of Minnesota, 1930-1942." The exhibit runs through November 30th of this year.

Tricia Oman, professor at Hastings College and director of Hastings College Press discusses growing up in the Midwest, discovering its literary heritage and prominence in the early 20th century, studying the growing cultural invisibility of Midwestern culture in latter half of the 20th century, the ways in which the Midwest has been defined popularly as “flyover country” by outsiders as to the region, and the nostalgia surrounding the Midwestern small town. Dr. Oman also talks about her work for the press rediscovering Midwestern texts, the press’s new series "Rediscovering the American Midwest," and a new book The Midwestern Moment (2017).

Dr. Bethel Saler discusses her 2015 book "The Settler's Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest" published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which officially recognized the United States as a sovereign republic, also doubled the territorial girth of the original thirteen colonies. The fledgling nation now stretched from the coast of Maine to the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes. With this dramatic expansion, argues author Bethel Saler, the United States simultaneously became a postcolonial republic and gained a domestic empire. The competing demands of governing an empire and a republic inevitably collided in the early American West. The Settlers' Empire traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the territory. These entwined administrations involved both formal institution building and the articulation of dominant cultural customs that, in turn, served also to establish boundaries of citizenship and racial difference.

In the Northwest Territory, diverse populations of newcomers and Natives struggled over the region's geographical and cultural definition in areas such as religion, marriage, family, gender roles, and economy. The success or failure of state formation in the territory thus ultimately depended on what took place not only in the halls of government but also on the ground and in the everyday lives of the region's Indians, Francophone creoles, Euro- and African Americans, and European immigrants. In this way, The Settlers' Empire speaks to historians of women, gender, and culture, as well as to those interested in the early national state, the early West, settler colonialism, and Native history.

Matthew E. Stanley's intimate study The Loyal West:

Civil War and Reunion in Middle America (University of Illinois Press) explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, and sectional reunion in this bellwether region. Using the lives of area soldiers and officers as a lens, Stanley reveals a place and a strain of collective memory that was anti-rebel, anti-eastern, and anti-black in its attitudes--one that came to be at the forefront of the northern retreat from Reconstruction and toward white reunion. The Lower Middle West's embrace of black exclusion laws, origination of the Copperhead movement, backlash against liberalizing war measures, and rejection of Reconstruction were all pivotal to broader American politics. And the region's legacies of white supremacy--from racialized labor violence to sundown towns to lynching--found malignant expression nationwide, intersecting with how Loyal Westerners remembered the war.

A daring challenge to traditional narratives of section and commemoration, The Loyal West taps into a powerful and fascinating wellspring of Civil War identity and memory.

Dr. Bruce Bigelow is a Professor of History at Butler University. His interest in teaching centers on the historical cultural geography of the US, especially the Midwest. He also teaches courses on the Civil War, US Urban History, the American Empire since 1945, the American Midwest, and World History. He also teaches Cultural Geography: Regions of the World for the core curriculum. Bruce's publications focus on Indiana during the Civil War, especially politics, and also the Midwest as a culture region.

Greg Dowd is a past chair of the the Department of American Culture (AC) and a past director of the AC Native American Studies program. His scholarly interests include the study of rumor and the history of the North American Indian East during the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. He has taught history at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Connecticut, and the University of the Witwatersrand (in Johannesburg, South Africa). He has held fellowships at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He wrote an expert witness report and gave professional testimony in deposition for tribes in a treaty-rights case in Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University (1986) and his B.A. in History at the University of Connecticut (1978).