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The Midwest Myth Or Reality
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Book Synopsis The Midwest: Myth Or Reality? by : Thomas Timothy McAvoy
Download or read book The Midwest: Myth Or Reality? written by Thomas Timothy McAvoy and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland by : James H. Madison
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland written by James H. Madison and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who is an American?" asked the Ku Klux Klan. It is a question that echoes as loudly today as it did in the early twentieth century. But who really joined the Klan? Were they "hillbillies, the Great Unteachables" as one journalist put it? It would be comforting to think so, but how then did they become one of the most powerful political forces in our nation's history? In The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, renowned historian James H. Madison details the creation and reign of the infamous organization. Through the prism of their operations in Indiana and the Midwest, Madison explores the Klan's roots in respectable white protestant society. Convinced that America was heading in the wrong direction because of undesirable "un-American" elements, Klan members did not see themselves as bigoted racist extremists but as good Christian patriots joining proudly together in a righteous moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland offers a detailed history of this powerful organization and examines how, through its use of intimidation, religious belief, and the ballot box, the ideals of Klan in the 1920s have on-going implications for America today.
Book Synopsis The Heartland by : Kristin L. Hoganson
Download or read book The Heartland written by Kristin L. Hoganson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of a quintessentially American place--the rural and small town heartland--that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world. When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the D.C. metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe. Struck by the gap between reputation and reality, she determined to get to the bottom of history and myth. The deeper she dug into the making of the modern heartland, the wider her story became as she realized that she'd uncovered an unheralded crossroads of people, commerce, and ideas. But the really interesting thing, Hoganson found, was that over the course of American history, even as the region's connections with the rest of the planet became increasingly dense and intricate, the idea of the rural Midwest as a steadfast heartland became a stronger and more stubbornly immovable myth. In enshrining a symbolic heart, the American people have repressed the kinds of stories that Hoganson tells, of sweeping breadth and depth and soul. In The Heartland, Kristin L. Hoganson drills deep into the center of the country, only to find a global story in the resulting core sample. Deftly navigating the disconnect between history and myth, she tracks both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the land. A provocative and highly original work of historical scholarship, The Heartland speaks volumes about pressing preoccupations, among them identity and community, immigration and trade, and security and global power. And food. To read it is to be inoculated against using the word "heartland" unironically ever again.
Book Synopsis The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing by : Ronald Weber
Download or read book The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing written by Ronald Weber and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a half-century - from Edward Eggleston's pioneering novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 through the dazzling early work of Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s - Midwestern literature was at the center of American writing. In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald Weber illuminates the sense of lost promise that gives rise to the elegiac note struck in many Midwestern works; he also addresses the deeply divided feelings about the region revealed in the contrary desires to abandon and to celebrate. The period of Midwestern cultural ascendancy was a time of tremendous social and technological change. Midwestern writing was a reflection of these societal changes; it was American literature.
Book Synopsis The American Midwest by : Andrew R. L. Cayton
Download or read book The American Midwest written by Andrew R. L. Cayton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-08 with total page 1918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.
Book Synopsis Myths of the Rune Stone by : David M. Krueger
Download or read book Myths of the Rune Stone written by David M. Krueger and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community’s and a state’s identity for decades. In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North American origin story, predating Christopher Columbus’s exploration, in which Viking missionaries reached what is now Minnesota in 1362 only to be massacred by Indians. The tale’s credibility was quickly challenged and ultimately undermined by experts, but the myth took hold. Faith in the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity. Accepted and proclaimed as truth, the story of the Rune Stone recast Native Americans as villains. The community used the account as the basis for civic celebrations for years, and advocates for the stone continue to promote its validity despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax. Krueger puts this stubborn conviction in context and shows how confidence in the legitimacy of the stone has deep implications for a wide variety of Minnesotans who embraced it, including Scandinavian immigrants, Catholics, small-town boosters, and those who desired to commemorate the white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862. Krueger demonstrates how the resilient belief in the Rune Stone is a form of civil religion, with aspects that defy logic but illustrate how communities characterize themselves. He reveals something unique about America’s preoccupation with divine right and its troubled way of coming to terms with the history of the continent’s first residents. By considering who is included, who is left out, and how heroes and villains are created in the stories we tell about the past, Myths of the Rune Stone offers an enlightening perspective on not just Minnesota but the United States as well.
Book Synopsis Kitchens of the Great Midwest by : J. Ryan Stradal
Download or read book Kitchens of the Great Midwest written by J. Ryan Stradal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows Eva Thorvald's life journey, rooted in the foods of Minnesota and growing into a legendary, sought-after chef.
Download or read book The New Midwest written by Mark Athitakis and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell to Stewart O'Nan this book is a call to rethink the way we conceive Midwestern fiction, and one that is sure to prompt some new must-have additions to every reading list.
Book Synopsis Myths and Realities by : Louis Harris and Associates
Download or read book Myths and Realities written by Louis Harris and Associates and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The American Midwest in Film and Literature by : Adam R. Ochonicky
Download or read book The American Midwest in Film and Literature written by Adam R. Ochonicky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.
Book Synopsis The Midwestern Pastoral by : William Barillas
Download or read book The Midwestern Pastoral written by William Barillas and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.
Book Synopsis Barnstorming the Prairies by : Jason Weems
Download or read book Barnstorming the Prairies written by Jason Weems and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon—and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself. Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it. Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Flyover Lives written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.
Book Synopsis Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice by : Steven E. Barkan
Download or read book Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice written by Steven E. Barkan and published by Jones & Bartlett Publishers. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Engaging and Accessible Overview of Crime and Justice in America For all their interest in crime, most Americans know very little about the reality of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States—and most of what Americans do know is a loose collection of accumulated truths, half-truths, and outright fallacies. Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice: What Every American Should Know, Second Edition provides a concise but thorough overview of criminal behavior, crime, and the criminal justice system in the United States. Using up-to-date social science research to debunk many of the beliefs Americans hold about crime, the book examines key topics such as serial killers and mass murders, gun violence, criminal victimization, identity theft, policing and police corruption, plea bargaining, jury nullification, wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and the “CSI Effect.” The fully revised and updated second edition of this popular text includes the most recent crime and criminal justice data, and covers several recent high-profile crimes, including the Newtown shooting, the Jerry Sandusky case, and the Trayvon Martin case. It also includes new sections on recent trends in crime rates, street gangs, and hate crimes. Ideally suited for students in criminal justice programs as well as professionals who work within or in tandem with the criminal justice system, Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice: What Every American Should Know, Second Edition is a thorough, engaging, and highly relevant portrait of crime and justice in America.
Download or read book Imagining Home written by Mark Vinz and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000-01-24 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteen nationally acclaimed authors reflect on how their Midwestern heritage has affected their attitudes, values, and development as writers. Includes brief biographies and bandw photos of contributors. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Book Synopsis The American Midwest by : Andrew R. L. Cayton
Download or read book The American Midwest written by Andrew R. L. Cayton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American MidwestEssays on Regional History Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray Is there a Midwest regional identity? Read this lively exploration of the Midwestern identity crisis and find out. "Many would say that ordinariness is the Midwest's 'historic burden.' A writer living in Dayton, Ohio recently suggested that dullness is a Midwestern trait. The Midwest lacks grand scenery: 'Just cornfields, silos, prairies, and the occasional hill. Dull.' He tries to put a nice face on Midwestern dullness by saying that Midwesterners '[l]ike Shaker furniture... are plain in the best sense: unadorned.' Others have found Midwestern ordinariness stultifying. Neil LaBute, who makes films about mean and nasty people, said he was negative because he came from Indiana: 'We're brutally honest in Indiana. We realize we're in the middle of nowhere, and we're very sore about it.'" -- from Chapter Five, "Barbecued Kentuckians and Six-Foot Texas Rangers," by Nicole Etcheson. In a series of often highly personal essays, the authors of The American Midwest -- 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. These lively and well-written chapters draw on personal experiences as well as a wide variety of scholarship. This book will 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. It suggests 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. Andrew R. L. Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is author of numerous books and articles dealing with the history of the Midwest, including Frontier Indiana (Indiana University Press) and (with Peter S. Onuf) The Midwest and the Nation. Susan E. Gray, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, is author of Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier as well as numerous articles about Midwest history. Midwestern History and CultureJames H. Madison and Andrew R. L. Cayton, editors July 2001256 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33941-3 $35.00 s / £26.50 Contents The Story of the Midwest: An Introduction Seeing the Midwest with Peripheral Vision: Identities, Narratives, and Region Liberating Contrivances: Narrative and Identity in Ohio Valley Histories Pigs in Space, or What Shapes American Regional Cultures? Barbecued Kentuckians and Six-Foot Texas Rangers: The Construction of Midwestern Identity Pi-ing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwestern Regionality "The Great Body of the Republic": Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of a Middle West Stories Written in the Blood: Race, Identity, and the Middle West The Anti-region: Place and Identity in the History of the American Middle West Midwestern Distinctiveness Middleness and the Middle West
Download or read book The Midwest written by Joseph W. Slade and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2004-12-30 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From architecture to food to music, this volume provides a textured examination of the many ways in which the Midwest has served as an undeniable cross-section of American culture. Includes the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin.