Travel north from the upper Midwest's metropolises, and before long you're "Up North"-a region that's hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area-and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats' so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. A deep look at the Midwest's history of conservative politics, this timely volume reveals how conservative victories in state houses, legislatures, and national elections in the early twenty-first century, far from coming out of nowhere, in fact had extensive roots across decades of political organization in the region. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of midwestern conservatism after World War II - a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region's complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest's political complexity - and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.

First impressions of the political landscape in South Dakota tend towards an assumption of hard-line conservatism, and yet such a conclusion barely scratches the surface of what constitutes political tradition in the Mount Rushmore State. Editors Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons, Jr., have drawn together twelve essays on disparate topics in order to consider the state's underlying political culture. Each essay addresses an aspect of history, politics, or art, subtly exposing the contradictory nature of South Dakotans and elucidating the many elements that comprise the larger political tradition. Scholars from around the country consider topics such as war and peace, literature, environmentalism, the American Indian Movement, left-wing and liberal politics, immigration, and defeat. With each essay, the discussion builds upon itself, allowing the reader to develop a fuller sense of where South Dakota fits into the growing study of political culture in modern society.

The story behind the unseating of a Senate majority leader the race between Tom Daschle and John Thune in South Dakota was widely acknowledged as ""the other big race of 2004."" Second in prominence only to the presidential race, the Daschle-Thune contest pitted the rival political ideologies that have animated American politics since the 1960s. In a sign of the ongoing strength of political conservatism, Daschle became the first Senate leader in fifty years to lose a re-election bid. Historian Jon K. Lauck, a South Dakotan who was an insider during that heated campaign, now offers a multilayered examination of this hard-fought and symbolically charged race. Blending historical narrative, political analysis, and personal reflection, he offers a close-up view of the issues that divide the nation - a case study of the continuing clash between liberalism and conservatism that has played out for more than a generation in U.S. politics. Daschle vs. Thune moves beyond the nitty-gritty of public policy to deftly show how the recent past continues to shape the ongoing political battles that animate pundits and bloggers. It is a compelling story told by a writer who knows both his home ground and how it fits into the wider U.S. context.

In comparison to such regions as the South, the far West, and New England, the Midwest and its culture have been neglected both by scholars and by the popular press. Historians as well as literary and art critics tend not to examine the Midwest in depth in their academic work. And in the popular imagination, the Midwest has never ascended to the level of the proud, literary South; the cultured, democratic Northeast; or the hip, innovative West Coast. Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.

Travel north from the upper Midwest's metropolises, and before long you're "Up North"-a region that's hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area-and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.

In comparison to such regions as the South, the far West, and New England, the Midwest and its culture have been neglected both by scholars and by the popular press. Historians as well as literary and art critics tend not to examine the Midwest in depth in their academic work. And in the popular imagination, the Midwest has never ascended to the level of the proud, literary South; the cultured, democratic Northeast; or the hip, innovative West Coast. Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.

At the center of American history is a hole-a gap where some scholars' indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest's formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation's history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern "squares" center stage-an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck's cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest's dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The "good country" was, of course, not the "perfect country," and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest's openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.

American democratic ideals, civic republicanism, public morality, and Christianity were the dominant forces at work during South Dakota's formative decade. What? In our cynical age, such a claim seems either remarkably naÏve or hopelessly outdated. Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured, as in the classic film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as a drunken exercise in bombast and rascality. Now Jon K. Lauck examines anew the values we like to think were at work during the founding of our western states. Taking Dakota Territory as a laboratory for examining a formative stage of western politics, Lauck finds that settlers from New England and the Midwest brought democratic practices and republican values to the northern plains and invoked them as guiding principles in the drive for South Dakota statehood. Prairie Republic corrects an overemphasis on class conflict and economic determinism, factors posited decades ago by such historians as Howard R. Lamar. Instead, Lauck finds South Dakota's political founders to be agents of Protestant Christianity and of civic republicanism - an age-old ideology that entrusted the polity to independent, landowning citizens who placed the common interest above private interest. Focusing on the political culture widely shared among settlers attracted to the Great Dakota Boom of the 1880s, Lauck shows how they embraced civic virtue, broad political participation, and agrarian ideals. Family was central in their lives, as were common-school education, work, and Christian community. In rescuing the story of Dakota's settlers from historical obscurity, Prairie Republic dissents from the recent darker portrayal of western history and expands our view and understanding of the American democratic tradition.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats' so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. A deep look at the Midwest's history of conservative politics, this timely volume reveals how conservative victories in state houses, legislatures, and national elections in the early twenty-first century, far from coming out of nowhere, in fact had extensive roots across decades of political organization in the region. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of midwestern conservatism after World War II - a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region's complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest's political complexity - and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.

At the center of American history is a hole-a gap where some scholars' indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest's formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation's history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern "squares" center stage-an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck's cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest's dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The "good country" was, of course, not the "perfect country," and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest's openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.

During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post-World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota's F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the "warm center" of the republic to its "ragged edge." This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest's regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation's interior voices.

South Dakota is often thought of as a conservative or "red" state, but its political culture is much more variegated and unpredictable than such colour-coded references might imply. Just as the nation as a whole consists of diverse regions and subcultures that manifest fairly wide swings of opinion and voting patterns over time, South Dakota contains its own geographic variations and political subcultures. The first volume illustrated the complex nature of state politics and cyclical change over time, and this new group of essays concentrates on some of the unpredictability and contradictoriness of the state and its citizens. Editors Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons, Jr., have brought together ten essays on a diverse number of topics to consider the state's underlying political culture. Contributors deliberate over such topics as the influence of political organisations, conservatism, patriotism, leadership, local and national political culture, people's movements, and cowboy politics in an effort to develop a fuller sense of where South Dakota fits into the growing study of modern political culture.

The American Midwest is an orphan among regions. In comparison to the South, the far West, and New England, its history has been sadly neglected. To spark more attention to their region, midwestern historians will need to explain the Midwest's crucial roles in the development of the entire country: it helped spark the American Revolution and stabilised the young American republic by strengthening its economy and endowing it with an agricultural heartland; it played a critical role in the Union victory in the Civil War; it extended the republican institutions created by the American founders, and then its settler populism made those institutions more democratic; it weakened and decentred the cultural dominance of the urban East; and its bustling land markets deepened Americans' embrace of capitalist institutions and attitudes. In addition to outlining the centrality of the Midwest to crucial moments in American history, Jon K. Lauck resurrects the long-forgotten stories of the institutions founded by an earlier generation of midwestern historians, from state historical societies to the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. Their strong commitment to local and regional communities rooted their work in place and gave it an audience outside the academy. He also explores the works of these scholars, showing that they researched a broad range of themes and topics, often pioneering fields that remain vital today. The Lost Region demonstrates the importance of the Midwest, the depth of historical work once written about the region, the continuing insights that can be gleaned from this body of knowledge, and the lessons that can be learned from some of its prominent historians, all with the intent of once again finding the forgotten centre of the nation and developing a robust historiography of the Midwest.