"1940 is a thoroughly researched, sweeping history of the most important era of the twentieth century, seen through the lens of the rural Midwest. It is also the story of people caught up in the sweep of events at the intersection of the Great Depression and World War II, determined to sustain normal, everyday lives. Small-town and farm residents worked and studied, went to church and ballgames, danced and sang, traveled and raised their families. They also worried and grieved, survived on hand-me-downs and belt-tightening diets; yet they had moments of great courage, and had faith in their futures. 1940 explores the economy, farming, education, religion, politics, ethnic-immigrant influences, rural electrification, the family home, entertainment and much more. The book brings to life several memorable figures--a hard-nosed Depression-era banker, a blacksmith mayor with a bold vision, a newspaper publisher-politician-overseas-envoy, bright, high-achieving students, a pioneer girl turned society matron, war heroes, one minister who sometimes seemed larger than life and another who gave his life"--Back cover.

Called a "tour de force" by historian Joseph Amato, the book is a history of the rural Midwest in 1940, a pivotal year in history between the Great Depression and World War II. Local, regional and national history - told through the perspective of a small Minnesota town and its people. The book is, in Amato's words, "Truly alive to one place during one year. Many people, classes and cultures, amply and intelligently unified....proving one place is many places, one time joins many lives and times. History here benefits from a journalist."

"In this study of the interaction between agricultural mechanization and rural culture, J. Sanford Rikoon focuses his analysis on grain threshing patterns in the Midwest from its early nineteenth-century beginnings--manual flailing and animal treading--to the adoption of the combined harvester-thresher between 1925 and 1945. The "golden age of threshing" began in the late nineteenth century, when steam engines and threshing machines became familiar sights on the rural harvest landscape. Rikoon considers the succession of threshing systems in terms of the relations between specific technologies, occupational practices, and the social organization of work"--Book jacket.

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.

2004 Minnesota Book Award Winner The Midwestern small town has long held an iconic place in American culture--from the imaginings of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. But the reality is much more complex, as the small town has been a study in transition from its very inception. In A Place Called Home, editors Richard O. Davies, Joseph A. Amato, and David R. Pichaske offer the first comprehensive examination of the Midwestern small town and its evolving nature from the 1800s to the present. This rich collection, gleaned from the best writings of historians, novelists, social scientists, poets, and journalists, features not only such well-known authors as Sherwood Anderson, Carol Bly, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, Langston Hughes, Garrison Keillor, William Kloefkorn, Sinclair Lewis, Susan Allen Toth, and Mark Twain but also many lesser known and exceptionally talented writers. Five chronological sections trace the founding, growth, and decline of the Midwestern town, and introductory comments illuminate its ever-changing face. The result is a wide-ranging collection of writings on the community at the heart of America.

Contemporary observers often quip that the American Southwest has become “Mexicanized,” but this view ignores the history of the region as well as the social reality. Mexican people and their culture have been continuously present in the territory for the past four hundred years, and Mexican Americans were actors in United States history long before the national media began to focus on them—even long before an international border existed between the United States and Mexico. North to Aztlán, an inclusive, readable, and affordable survey history, explores the Indian roots, culture, society, lifestyles, politics, and art of Mexican Americans and the contributions of the people to and their influence on American history and the mainstream culture. Though cognizant of changing interpretations that divide scholars, Drs. De León and Griswold del Castillo provide a holistic vision of the development of Mexican American society, one that attributes great importance to immigration (before and after 1900) and the ongoing influence of new arrivals on the evolving identity of Mexican Americans. Also showcased is the role of gender in shaping the cultural and political history of La Raza, as exemplified by the stories of outstanding Mexicana and Chicana leaders as well as those of largely unsung female heros, among them ranch and business owners and managers, labor leaders, community activists, and artists and writers. In short, readers will come away from this extensively revised and completely up-to-date second edition with a new understanding of the lives of a people who currently compose the largest minority in the nation. Completely revised, re-edited, and redesigned, featuring a great many new photographs and maps, North to Aztlán is certain to take its rightful place as the best college-level survey text of Americans of Mexican descent on the market today.

Before the heyday of the Chitlin Circuit and the Harlem Renaissance, African American performing artists and creative entrepreneurs—sometimes called Black Bohemians—seized their limited freedoms and gained both fame and fortune with their work in a white-dominated marketplace. These Black performers plied their trade in circuses, blues tents, and Wild West Shows with Native Americans. The era’s traveling entertainments often promoted the “disappearing Indian” myth and promoted racial hierarchies with Black and Native people at the bottom. But in a racial economy rooted in settler-colonialism and legacies of enslavement, Black and Indigenous performers found that otherness could be a job qualification. Whether as artists or manual laborers, these workers rejected marginalization by traveling the world, making a solid living off their talents, and building platforms for political and social critique. Eventually, America’s popular entertainment industry could not survive without Black and Native Americans’ creative labor. As audiences came to eagerly anticipate their genius, these performers paved the way for greater social, economic, and cultural autonomy. Sakina M. Hughes provides a conceptually rich work revealing memorable individuals—laborers, artists, and entrepreneurs—who, faced with danger and discrimination, created surprising opportunities to showcase their talents and gain fame, wealth, and mobility.

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

"The robust Jewish community of Cleveland, Ohio is the largest Midwestern Jewish community with about 80,000 Jewish residents. Historically, it has been one of the largest hubs of American Jewish life outside of the East Coast. Yet there is a critical gap in the literature relating to Jewish Cleveland, its suburbs, and the Midwestern Jewish experience. Cleveland's Jews in the Urban Midwest remedies this gap, and adds to an emerging subfield in American Jewish history that moves away from the East Coast to explore Jewish life across the United States, in cities including Chicago and Detroit, and across regions like the West Coast. Cleveland's Jews in the Urban Midwest features ten diverse studies from prominent international scholars, addressing a wide range of subjects and ultimately enhancing our understanding of regional, urban, and Jewish American history. Focusing on the twentieth century specifically, the historians included in this collection address critical questions about Jewish Cleveland in the history of the United States. Essays investigate Jewish philanthropy, comics, gender, religious identity and education from the perspectives of both Reform and Orthodox Jewish communities, participation in social service organizations, and the Soviet Jewish movement, among other subjects, and reveal the different roles these subjects play in shaping Jewish communities over time. Uniquely, this is a work of regional history that engages fully in parallel conversations in Jewish history and urban history, making the volume a key addition to these three dynamic fields"--Provided by publisher.

The Midwest holds two conflicting positions in the American cultural imagination, both of which rob the region of its distinctiveness. Often, it is seen as the “heartland,” a pastoral ideal standing in for all of American culture. Alternatively, the Midwest can represent “flyover country,” part of an expansive, undifferentiated mass between the coasts. In Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, Andy Oler challenges both views by pairing fiction and poetry from the region with cultural and material texts that illustrate the processes by which regional modernism both opposes and absorbs prevailing models of twentieth-century manhood. Although it acknowledges a tradition of Midwestern urban literature, Old-Fashioned Modernism focuses on representations of life on farms and in small towns that generate specific forms of rural modernity. Oler considers a series of male protagonists who both fulfill and resist conventional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. The writers he studies portray the onset of socioeconomic and mechanical modernity by merging realist and naturalist narratives with upwellings of modernist form and style. His analysis charts a trajectory in which Midwestern literature depicts experiences that appear dependent on nostalgic pastoralism but actually foreground the ongoing fragmentation and emerging anxieties of the countryside. In detailed readings of novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Oler highlights images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization. These works of literature, which Oler examines alongside pieces of material culture like advertisements for farm implements and record labels, feature communities that support self-made as well as corporate identities. As portraits of the Midwest that resist the totalizing trajectory of industrialization, these texts generate spaces that meld rural and urban economics, land use, and affective experiences. Old-Fashioned Modernism reveals how Midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and midcentury rural masculinities, as regional literature and culture alter the forms and spaces of literary modernism.