The Heartland
An American History
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نقد و بررسی
February 1, 2019
A revelatory examination of America's "symbolic center in national mythologies."After teaching at Harvard and living in the Washington, D.C., area, among other stops, Hoganson (History/Univ. of Illinois; American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents, 2016, etc.) found herself unexpectedly transplanted to the Midwest. Instead of readily accepting stereotypes of the nation's so-called heartland, she began mining the roots of many of these preconceptions. The result is this brilliantly reasoned, meticulously researched book, which refreshingly pushes against stereotypes at every turn. The author demonstrates how the stereotypes and myths about the heartland eventually became conventional wisdom. For decades, any attentive Midwesterner has known that Illinois is not Iowa, is not Missouri, is not Indiana, etc. However, even Hoganson had not realized the gap between reality and the lumped-together reputation of many of these states. For this book, she first began digging into data close to her new home in Urbana-Champaign, where the University of Illinois is located, and then moved beyond to explore community and national elements. Hoganson looked at practices that many conventional scholars have missed: how the raising of cattle for beef led Midwestern farmers to interact with markets around the world, how the raising of hogs for pork led to many of the same results, how most Midwestern voters have never subscribed to isolationist politics, and how so-called flyover country turned out to be anything but boringly flat and technologically backward. Consistently, the author persuasively argues that the term "heartland" must be retired; the geographic center of the United States, she writes, is pulsing with global connections, innovations, varieties of human experiences, and ecological diversity. Hoganson closes by reiterating how "the heartland myth came to be so commensensical: its scaled-up localness is far easier to grasp than the vast complexity of the real world."With lively prose, Hoganson delivers an eye-opening, outside-the-box book that is mind-bending in all the right ways.
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Starred review from March 4, 2019
In this sophisticated, complex work, history professor Hoganson (Consumers’ Imperium) uses the history of Champaign County, Ill., to explore and question the American myth of its “heartland” as a safe, insulated, provincial place—“the quintessential home referenced by ‘homeland security.’” The first chapter shows how white settlers in 1700s and 1800s emphasized local settlement to justify taking land from the mobile Kickapoo population of Central Illinois. Hoganson uses the raising of cattle and hogs in Champaign to trace shifting borders on the North American continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then she dismantles the myth of the isolationist heartland with an analysis of Champaign’s involvement with organizations such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the International Institute of Agriculture. And she flips the “flyover country” cliché, looking at how Champaign citizens are connected to the rest of the world by telegraph wires, the weather, migratory birds, and military planes. The final chapter follows the Kickapoo people’s experiences into the 20th century, demonstrating that, contrary to myth, nothing about the heartland’s geography makes it a safe place. Deeply researched with a well-proven argument, Hoganson’s book will attract many scholars as well as general readers who like innovative, challenging history.
November 15, 2018
Having studied at Yale, taught at Harvard, and lived in Washington, DC, and abroad, historian Hoganson arrived at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with the idea that the Midwest was a small-town place defining a sort of unadulterated and patriotic American ideal. Here, she reveals that idea to be one of those big American myths, with the heartland proving to be more complicated and heterogeneous than typically imagined. The final volume in the "Penguin History of American Life" series.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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