Heartland History

Max Fraser discussers migration, labor, and culture in the Midwest by examining the experiences of migrant white workers in the region. The full book, Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class, can be purchased at the Princeton University Press website, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691191119/hillbilly-highway.

Crystal Marie Moten - Continually Working by Midwestern History Association

John Nelson - Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent by Midwestern History Association

Dr. Melissa Ford joins us to discuss her new book A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression, published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Ashley Howard - What to the "Other" is the Midwest? by Midwestern History Association

Jon Lauck discussed his most recent book, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900.

Dr. Alonzo Ward is an assistant professor of history at Eastern Illinois University. He focuses on African American history in the Midwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the general history of race and ethnicity in the United States. Specifically, he researches African American labor history in Illinois in conjunction with the larger labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We are talking to him about his recent article “‘A Revolution in Labor:’ African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era,” which was recently published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.

Writer Steven Moore discusses his recent collection essays, The Distance from Slaughter County: Lessons from Flyover Country, recently published at the University of North Carolina Press.

Dr. Christopher Ali is the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications and Professor of Telecommunications in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. His research interests include media and telecommunications policy and regulation, broadband policy, critical political economy, critical geography, comparative media systems, qualitative research methods, media localism and local news. In this episode Dr. Ali discusses his book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021).

Dr. Fernández-Jones discusses her research which appeared in an edited collection titled, Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest. She also discusses her forthcoming book, Making the MexiRican City: Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Both projects were published by University of Illinois Press.

Dr. Kai Bosworth discusses his book, Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century which was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Dr. Sasha Maria Suarez, an assistant professor of history at UW-Madison talks about her latest essay "Indigenizing Minneapolis: Building American Indian Community Infrastructure in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” which appears in Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanism, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. From the publisher: "From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and Tenochtitlán to the twenty-first century Oceti Sakowin encampment of NoDAPL water protectors, Native people have built and lived in cities—a fact little noted in either urban or Indigenous histories. By foregrounding Indigenous peoples as city makers and city dwellers, as agents and subjects of urbanization, the essays in this volume simultaneously highlight the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous people and politics. The authors—Native and non-Native, anthropologists and geographers as well as historians—use the term “Indian cities” to represent collective urban spaces es

Camden joins Drs. Andrew Klumpp, Pamela-Riney Kehrberg, and Rebecca Conard for a wide-ranging conversation about regionalism, state and local history, and a recent issue of The Annals of Iowa. If you are interested in learning more about The Annals of Iowa, previous issues are available here: https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/annals-of-iowa/issues/

Camden and Phil have a wide-ranging conversation about the Midwest as a place and as an idea, focusing particuarly on Phil's lastest book Midwest Futures available from Belt Publishing (https://beltpublishing.com/products/midwest-futures). From the Publisher: The Midwest: Is it middle? Or is it Western? As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic, critically acclaimed essay collection, these and other ambiguities might well be the region's defining characteristic. Deftly combining history, criticism, and memoir, Christman breaks his exploration of midwestern identity, past and present, into a suite of thirty-six brief, interconnected essays. Ranging across material questions of religion, race, class, climate, and Midwestern myth making, the result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

Camden and Dr. Benjamin Park discuss Dr. Park's book "Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier." From the Publisher: In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631494864

Guest, Dr. Brandon Ward who is the author of the recent study "Living Detroit Environmental Activism in an Age of Urban Crisis" (Routledge 2021) has a wide-ranging conversation with Camden about the ways environmental concerns were inseparable from issues related to housing, civil rights, suburbanization, organized labor, and deindustrialization in Detroit. Dr. Ward also draws attention to the opportunities that greater awareness of this legacy in contemporary political discourse creates for Detroiters. From the publisher: In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life. Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, p

This episode, Camden sits down with Edward E. Curtis IV who is the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of Liberal Arts & Professor of Religious Studies at IUPUI. Dr. Curtis discusses his most recent book, Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (New York University Press). From the publisher: "The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them. Edward E. Curtis IV, a descendant of Syrian Midwesterners, vividly portrays the intrepid men and women who busted sod on the short-grass prairies of the Dakotas, peddled needles and lace on the streets of Cedar Rapids, and worked in the railroad car factories of Michigan City. This intimate portrait follows the stories

On this edition of Heartland History, Camden is joined by Dr. Molly Rozum of the University of South Dakota to discuss her new book Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies. From the University of Nebraska Press: "In Grasslands Grown Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation. Rozum

This episode, Camden sits down with Dr. Lynne Heasley, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at WMU to discuss her new book "The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes" (2021). Dr. Heasley's book is available through Michigan State University Press https://msupress.org/9781611864076/the-accidental-reef-and-other-ecological-odysseys-in-the-great-lakes/ or your local independent bookseller.

In this episode, Camden has a conversation with Professor Kristy Nabhan-Warren, who is the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair in Catholic Studies Departments of Religious Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, about her latest published research, "Meat Packing America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland" (2021). The book is available directly from UNC Press (https://uncpress.org/book/9781469663494/meatpacking-america/) or from your local bookseller.