Provincial Lives, first published in 1999, tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history, as well as social, immigration, gender and urban history, the author examines how a succession of settlers from 'good' society - farmers and entrepreneurs, followed by capitalists, professionals, and 'genteel' men and women from the urban East - interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society and culture. Provincial Lives explores social change through the lived experience of the actors themselves as they employed their understandings of self, gender, class, and culture to construct social order and contribute to the development of a western urban middle class while still remaining members of a national society and playing a role in shaping the emergence of middle-class culture across the United States.

Between 1820 and the Civil War, the upper Mississippi valley was at the center of national and international attention. At the edge of the northern frontier, this area, known as "The Great West," was the destination of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the East and from northern Europe. This book analyzes the development, maturation, growth, and sudden decline of the distinctive regional urban-economic system that developed in this area. Drawing from a variety of methods used in historical geography, economic history, systems analysis, and social and urban history, the author analyzes how early settlement patterns were affected by experience, climate, and geography, and, in turn, shaped the initial patterns of economic, urban, and transportation development. As the systems developed, towns became more functionally differentiated and several towns emerged as the more important competitors for regional hinterland control. The center of the analysis focuses on the efforts of these river towns to respond to a variety of settlement, economic, and transport network forces that worked in favor of the regional entrepots of Chicago and St. Louis.

Among the most dangerous criminals of the public enemies era was a man who has long hidden in history's shadows: Tom Brown. In the early 1930s, while he was police chief of St. Paul, Minnesota, Brown became a secret partner of the infamous Barker gang. He profited from their violent crimes, he protected the gang from raids by the nascent FBI--and while he did all this, the gangsters gunned down cops and citizens in his hometown.
Big Tom Brown, 6'5" and 275 pounds, continued to enforce St. Paul's corrupt O'Connor system, allowing criminals to stay in the city as long as they paid off the cops and committed no crimes within fifty miles. But in the early 1930s, the system broke down: no longer supported by cash skimmed from illegal booze, gangsters turned to robbing banks, and the Barker gang kidnapped two of the prominent citizens who had been complicit in the liquor trade. Brown was the insider who kept the criminals safe--but for highly political reasons, he was never convicted of his crimes.
Timothy Mahoney tells this fascinating story, details how the fraud was uncovered, and at last exposes the corruption of a secret partnership.
Timothy Mahoney, an editor at the "St. Paul Pioneer Press," formerly worked at the "San Francisco Chronicle" and the "Wisconsin State Journal" and has also taught journalism and English. He is the author of two novels.

Provincial Lives, first published in 1999, tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history, as well as social, immigration, gender and urban history, the author examines how a succession of settlers from 'good' society - farmers and entrepreneurs, followed by capitalists, professionals, and 'genteel' men and women from the urban East - interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society and culture. Provincial Lives explores social change through the lived experience of the actors themselves as they employed their understandings of self, gender, class, and culture to construct social order and contribute to the development of a western urban middle class while still remaining members of a national society and playing a role in shaping the emergence of middle-class culture across the United States.

Between 1820 and the Civil War, the upper Mississippi valley was at the center of national and international attention. At the edge of the northern frontier, this area, known as "The Great West," was the destination of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the East and from northern Europe. This book analyzes the development, maturation, growth, and sudden decline of the distinctive regional urban-economic system that developed in this area. Drawing from a variety of methods used in historical geography, economic history, systems analysis, and social and urban history, the author analyzes how early settlement patterns were affected by experience, climate, and geography, and, in turn, shaped the initial patterns of economic, urban, and transportation development. As the systems developed, towns became more functionally differentiated and several towns emerged as the more important competitors for regional hinterland control. The center of the analysis focuses on the efforts of these river towns to respond to a variety of settlement, economic, and transport network forces that worked in favor of the regional entrepots of Chicago and St. Louis.

Although the framework of regionalist studies may seem to be crumbling under the weight of increasing globalization, this collection of seventeen essays makes clear that cultivating regionalism lies at the center of the humanist endeavor. With interdisciplinary contributions from poets and fiction writers, literary historians, musicologists, and historians of architecture, agriculture, and women, this volume implements some of the most innovative and intriguing approaches to the history and value of regionalism as a category for investigation in the humanities. In the volume's inaugural essay, Annie Proulx discusses landscapes in American fiction, comments on how she constructs characters, and interprets current literary trends. Edward Watts offers a theory of region that argues for comparisons of the United States to other former colonies of Great Britain, including New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Whether considering a writer's connection to region or the idea of place in exploring what is meant by regionalism, these essays uncover an enduring and evolving concept. Although the approaches and disciplines vary, all are framed within the fundamental premise of the humanities: the search to understand what it means to be human.

Mahoney examines how members of the middle class from small cities across the great West were transformed by boom and bust, years of recession, and civil war. He argues that in their encounters with national economic forces, the national crisis in politics, and the Civil War, middle class people were cut adrift from the social identity that they had established in the 'face to face' communities of the 'hometowns' of the urban West. By grounding them in their hometown ethos, and understanding how the Panic of 1857 and the subsequent recession undermined their lives, the author provides important insights into how they encountered, responded to, and were changed by their experiences in the Civil War. Providing a rare view of social history through the framework of the Civil War, the author documents, in both breadth and depth, the dramatic change and development of modern life in nineteenth-century America.