Middle West Review!

A tip of the hat to Paula Stuart-Warren for alerting us to a new twice-yearly journal from the University of Nebraska Press. The editors and editorial board (slightly different lists) are all academics but seem open to "nonscholars" as well. Here's their opening elevator pitch:

"The Middle West Review is an interdisciplinary journal about the American Midwest and the only publication dedicated exclusively to the study of the Midwest as a region. It provides a forum for scholars and nonscholars alike to explore the contested meanings of midwestern identity, history, geography, society, culture, and politics. What states belong within the Midwest? Is the Midwest inherently rural? Are Chicago and Pacific Junction, Iowa, part of the same region? If so, what links them? What traditions or features define the Midwest? Does the Midwest have a particular economic identity? Is the Midwest 'queer'? How does the Midwest’s racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity square with its popular perception as a homogenous space? Is the Midwest 'distinctive'? If so, why do Americans often conceive of it as a 'normative' site, one divorced from the historical intrigue and conflict of the South and the West?"

The last link above is both blog and website. The table of contents for the Fall 2014 issue is here.

Whether you choose to spend $40 for two issues a year or not, be sure to check out the working bibliography of recent "Midwestern Histories and Studies" from editor-in-chief Paul Mokrzycki  -- 39 so far (all but one published in the last 25 years), including two of my all-time favorites, William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis and Richard White's The Middle Ground -- and several more that I need to become acquainted with!

Compared to other regions, this is not a big bookshelf.



Harold Henderson, "Middle West Review!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Tidbits from the History Table

Book reviews lead to expenditures, of time or money or both. In this case I found potential goodies dealing with the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The current American Historical Review has an interesting review of Cathleen D. Cahill's Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. Several levels of interest here. One has to do with unintended consequences: "Federal lawmakers assumed after the Civil War that the Indian Service would eventually work itself out of existence as native assimilation occurred." The other has to do with bureaucracy in general, and has relevance to almost any genealogy work: "It is this lower level of bureaucracy that literally determines what the actual policy of the government will be and rarely does it coincide with what the policy initiators envisioned."

Over at the blog US Intellectual History, Tim Lacy posted some reflections on Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. Short version: "The book is worth at least half of a graduate education in the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history.  . . . should be on the shelf of every single historian who proclaims to study or teach post-Civil War history." (So far I'm wishing that Lears could have been a little less judgmental, but not sure how that would have worked.)

Meanwhile, William Cronon's outgoing address as president of the American Historical Association called attention to the facts that new students have no experience of off-line research, do little reading for pleasure and less of full-length books. His conclusion for historians: remember to tell stories, and the past is the greatest story of all: "Our core business is RESURRECTION: to make the dead past live again. ... Other professionals can afford to be boring. We cannot."




David E. Wilkins, review of Federal Fathers and Mothers, American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (December 2012):1598-99.


Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Tim Lacy, "Rebirth of a Nation: Reflections, Ruminations, and Reactions," US Intellectual History, 27 December 2012, http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/12/rebirth-of-nation-reflections.html : accessed 31 December 2012.

Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 

David Austin Walsh, "Highlights from the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association: Dispatches, Day 2," History News Network (http://hnn.us/articles/highlights-2013-annual-meeting-american-historical-association#Day2 : accessed 4 January 2012).
 

Harold Henderson, "Tidbits from the History Table," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Cronon on Teaching

Historian William Cronon once again hits the bull's-eye as he argues that teaching is no less important than research.

"Our students require us to come back from the outer edges of our discipline to show them the core assumptions without which we would never find those edges. . . . Perhaps most of all, they bless us with their confusion and boredom, instantly revealing to us . . . the places where something we've said or done is in fact confusing and boring."

Read the whole thing...


William Cronon, "And Gladly Teach," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 9 (December 2012):5-6.

Harold Henderson, "Cronon on Teaching," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Downside of Search and Scroll

University of Wisconsin historian and AHA president William Cronon dives deep into the meaning of technology -- from physical scrolls to printed books to Google and Amazon -- in an amazing and unsettling essay in the new issue of Perspectives on History. He is no armchair critic hiding in a moldy library, and we will be hearing more about his "20-year effort to build digital libraries on handheld devices, and how frequently I've had to reformat public-domain e-books from .txt to .lit to .html to .doc to .pdf to .mobi to .epub, with no hope of retaining my own annotations in the process."

Another angle:

Can physical books come close to competing with computers when it comes to search? Of course not. But when one wants to relocate a piece of information in a particular context, and when one remembers that context better than the information itself, then it can be surprisingly difficult for search alone to recover what one wants.

How do disciplines the depend not just on details but on context reap the advantages of new hardware and software while minimizing the problems they create? Cronon doesn't have the answer but he knows there's a question.



William Cronon, "Recollecting My Library...and My Self," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 8 (November 2012), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1211/Recollecting-My-Library-and-My-Self.cfm : accessed 19 November 2012.


Harold Henderson, "The Downside of Search and Scroll," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Are We Reading Too Fast? And a Chicago Antidote

University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon worries about some aspects of today:

I embrace and celebrate the digital age. I believe historians should use blogs and tweets, Wikipedia entries and YouTube videos, web pages and Facebook postings, and any number of other new media tools to share our knowledge with the wider world. But I also celebrate complicated arguments that need space to develop and patience to understand. And I love long stories that can only unfold across hundreds of pages or screens. What I most fear about this new age is its impatience and its distractedness. If history as we know it is to survive, it is these we most need to resist as we practice and defend long, slow, thoughtful reading.

Perhaps there will be room to maneuver a bit even within those confines. Cronon asserts that "the most effective blogs are typically one to three paragraphs in length," but the most popular post by far in the last month on this blog was a full six paragraphs long.

Meanwhile, anyone with the slightest interest in Chicago or Midwestern history can dig into Cronon's masterpiece, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. In another life, I had the privilege of reviewing it: "Cronon's research is so thorough, his explanations so deep, his sprinkling of evocative details so apt that the reader sees the 'obvious' with new eyes." Cronon's colleague Kenneth Jackson put it more straightforwardly: "No one has ever written a better book about a city."



William Cronon, "How Long Will People Read History Books?," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 7 (October 2012), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1210/index.cfm : accessed 5 October 2012.

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).


Harold Henderson, "Past Prophecies," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Another angle on professionalism

William Cronon has been one of my favorite historians ever since 1991, when he published the definitive account of 19th-century Chicago and its hinterland, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

Now he's the president of the American Historical Association with some interesting thoughts on that profession in the March 2012 AHA newsletter Perspectives on History:

. . .professional historians who work in the academy should be immensely grateful when they are joined in an organization like the AHA by professional historians who make documentaries, design web sites, post blogs, curate exhibits, teach school, and publish popular books. Only if we all gather together under the same big tent will we be able to learn from each other the ways good history can be more effective in reaching the many audiences that hunger for its insights. Forty million people watched Ken Burns's documentaries on The Civil War. Barbara Tuchman probably influenced more people's understanding of the First World War than any other historian of her generation. Public school teachers shape the historical consciousness of many millions more students (and citizens) than college teachers ever will. And so on and on.

How do we avoid professional boredom? By making sure we don't define "professional" too narrowly.

Read the whole thing!