Can Jon Lauck put the Midwest back on the map as a field of academic study?
Lauck, a historian and former professor at South Dakota State University, made a persuasive case for Midwestern history, a once-thriving field, with his book “The Lost Region,” published last December. Northwestern University’s Bill Savage, writing about the book in Printer’s Row Journal, called it “well-written narrative history.” But what was missing, Lauck thought, was a coordinated effort to rally the academic community around Lauck’s view that the Midwest is as fertile a ground for study as the South, West and New England, not to mention the Great Plains.
To that end, the University of Nebraska Press has just published the first issue of the Middle West Review. It is the culmination of Lauck’s efforts begun a year ago, when he first floated the idea to his peers of forming what would become the Midwestern History Working Group.
“I thought it was weird that there isn’t a history conference or academic journal that focuses on Midwestern history,” Lauck recalled in a phone interview. And so, at last year’s meeting of the Northern Great Plains History Conference in Hudson, Wis., Lauck sent out an email inviting interested parties to join him in the hotel bar to discuss it. “I thought a few would trickle in,” he said, laughing. “I offered to buy beer, because there’s always poor graduate students. Thirty-five people showed up.”
If Chicago has a “Second City” complex, the Midwest may have a “Fourth Region” hang-up. Despite its many significant contributions to U.S. history, the Midwest “is not a very sexy topic,” Lauck admits.
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But consider the role Midwesterners played in the outcome of the Civil War, he said. “More than 210,000 people marched off from Indiana alone,” he said. “That’s a huge number for a state that was not very big in 1860.”
What happened to this once-thriving field of study? “An older generation retired or died, and no one picked up the mantle,” Lauck said. “The history of the Midwest is an amazing story in the sense that compared to other places, there was a lot of assimilation and working together. It just doesn’t have the very sad and grim history that other regions do, which may be one of the reasons it is understudied. People generally want drama in (their) history.”
The University of Wisconsin-Platteville, for example, offers a history course on the West but not the Midwest. “We are a fairly small school, but even the larger schools do not focus on the Midwest,” said Paula Nelson, a recently retired professor in the history department there, in a phone interview. “(Midwestern) schools might teach the history of their individual states, but even those are fading. The professors are looking in terms of broader national or global themes. States seem passé.”
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“I don’t want to be critical of multiculturalism and global studies,” Lauck insisted. “But I think there is a hunger for knowledge of one’s roots.”
Middle West Review will be published biannually. The inaugural issue contains essays on contemporary disinclination toward historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s notion of the frontier, the Irish immigrant experience, and a recount of the 2011 Iowa Straw Poll. Lauck’s contribution is an interview with 93-year-old Allan G. Bogue, whom he calls “the last living link to an earlier era where there was a much more lively Midwestern history.”
Also included are reviews of Midwest-centric books such as Michael Schumacher’s “November’s Fury: The Deadly Great Lakes Hurricane of 1913” and George F. Will’s “A Nice Little Place on the North Side”; movies such as “Nebraska”; and TV shows such as “Parks and Recreation,” set in the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee.
Lauck has deep roots in the Midwest. He was brought up on a farm in South Dakota and still lives in the state. This fall he is teaching a Midwest history course at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. It’s one of the few offered in the country.
“I’m inventing it as I go,” he said. “There’s no road map for this.”
Donald Liebenson is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.