Heartland History

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.

Heartland History is back! We are thrilled to host a conversation with guest Dr. Dana Caldemeyer, Associate Professor of History at South Georgia State College. Dr. Caldemeyer talks with our new host Dr. Camden Burd about her new book "Union Renegades: Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age" (2021)published by the University of Illinois Press. Their conversation covers the tangled relationship of miners in the Midwest to labor organizations and to the corporate entities that employed them. If you are interested in Dr. Caldemeyer's book, follow this link or order a copy from your local independent bookseller: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/39dem6cr9780252043505.html

Jillian Marie Jacklin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History interviews Sergio González who is the Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the Departments of History and of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Marquette University. Jacklin and González discuss his 2017 book "Mexicans in Wisconsin" published by the Wisconsin Historical Society, the vital importance of studying the past and present patterns of immigration in the Midwest (particularly in Milwaukee), as well as the political components of research on immigrant communities and citizenship in the contemporary cultural moment. In addition to his 2017 book and his teaching, Dr. González serves on the editorial board of "Wisconsin 101: Our History in Objects" and is working on “Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest,” an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Humanities Without Walls consortium-funded project. Jillian Jacklin studies labor and working-class history with an emphasis on U.S. social movements and

Guest contributor Professor Katie Day Good of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio interviews Professor Kathryn Remlinger, author of Yooper Talk: Dialect as Identity in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, published by the University of Wisconsin Press (2017). Professor Remlinger — in addition to helpfully explaining what a “Yooper” is! — discusses her work with linguistic identity in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the methodology behind her research, the history of settlement in the region, the immigrant populations that shaped the region economically, culturally, and linguistically, and the varieties of English dialects that emerged in the region.

For the 40th episode of the podcast, Jon talks with Liesl Olson about her new book published by Yale University Press, titled "Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis" (2017). Olson is the Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry library and has taught at the University of Chicago, received fellowships from the National Endowment the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Newberry Library. Olson's first book Modernism and the Ordinary was published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

Jon interviews Steve Paul, a former Kansas City Star reporter and the author of “Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend,” published this month by Chicago Review Press. Paul discusses his work researching Hemingway, learning more about his connections to the Kansas City Star, and the importance of the Midwest to Hemingway’s identity and writing. Steve Paul will be speaking about “Hemingway at Eighteen” at the Iowa City Book Festival on at 2:30 PM on Saturday October 14th at the Iowa City Public Library.

Jon talks with author Melissa Fraterrigo, whose latest book titled "Glory Days" was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September of 2017. In the interview, Fraterrigo discusses growing up (and later living) all across the Midwest, how she became an author, and her love of teaching writing and literature as the current Director and as the Founder of the Lafayette Writers' Studio in Lafayette, Indiana.

One day away from Heartland History's one year anniversary, Jon talks about the background of the Iowa City Book Fair with John Kenyon, the Director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. They also discuss the festival this year, the literary past and present of Iowa City, and the importance of Iowa's designation as only one of twenty UNESCO Cities of Literature globally. The Iowa City Book Festival runs from October 8th-15th.

Dr. Mark Soderstrom of SUNY Empire State College discusses his dissertation work on race, segregation, and housing at the University of Minnesota in the early 20th century, as well as an exhibit based on his research at the University of Minnesota's Elmer L. Andersen Library Atrium Gallery entitled "A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anti-Communists, Racism, and Anti-Semitism at the University of Minnesota, 1930-1942." The exhibit runs through November 30th of this year.

Tricia Oman, professor at Hastings College and director of Hastings College Press discusses growing up in the Midwest, discovering its literary heritage and prominence in the early 20th century, studying the growing cultural invisibility of Midwestern culture in latter half of the 20th century, the ways in which the Midwest has been defined popularly as “flyover country” by outsiders as to the region, and the nostalgia surrounding the Midwestern small town. Dr. Oman also talks about her work for the press rediscovering Midwestern texts, the press’s new series "Rediscovering the American Midwest," and a new book The Midwestern Moment (2017).

Dr. Bethel Saler discusses her 2015 book "The Settler's Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest" published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which officially recognized the United States as a sovereign republic, also doubled the territorial girth of the original thirteen colonies. The fledgling nation now stretched from the coast of Maine to the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes. With this dramatic expansion, argues author Bethel Saler, the United States simultaneously became a postcolonial republic and gained a domestic empire. The competing demands of governing an empire and a republic inevitably collided in the early American West. The Settlers' Empire traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the territory. These entwined administrations involved both formal institution buildin

Matthew E. Stanley's intimate study The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America (University of Illinois Press) explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, and sectional reunion in this bellwether region. Using the lives of area soldiers and officers as a lens, Stanley reveals a place and a strain of collective memory that was anti-rebel, anti-eastern, and anti-black in its attitudes--one that came to be at the forefront of the northern retreat from Reconstruction and toward white reunion. The Lower Middle West's embrace of black exclusion laws, origination of the Copperhead movement, backlash against liberalizing war measures, and rejection of Reconstruction were all pivotal to broader American politics. And the region's legacies of white supremacy--from racialized labor violence to sundown towns to lynching--found malignant expression nationwide, intersecting with how Loyal Westerners remembered the war. A daring challenge to traditional narratives of section and commemoration, The Loyal West taps i

Dr. Bruce Bigelow is a Professor of History at Butler University. His interest in teaching centers on the historical cultural geography of the US, especially the Midwest. He also teaches courses on the Civil War, US Urban History, the American Empire since 1945, the American Midwest, and World History. He also teaches Cultural Geography: Regions of the World for the core curriculum. Bruce's publications focus on Indiana during the Civil War, especially politics, and also the Midwest as a culture region.

Greg Dowd is a past chair of the the Department of American Culture (AC) and a past director of the AC Native American Studies program. His scholarly interests include the study of rumor and the history of the North American Indian East during the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. He has taught history at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Connecticut, and the University of the Witwatersrand (in Johannesburg, South Africa). He has held fellowships at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He wrote an expert witness report and gave professional testimony in deposition for tribes in a treaty-rights case in Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University (1986) and his B.A. in History at the University of Connecticut (1978).

From the 47th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature in East Lansing, Michigan. Dr. Jeffrey Swenson (Hiram College) presents his paper "Defending the Revolt from the Village: Reinforcing Sinclair Lewis in the Age of Trump." Dr. Marcia Noe (University of Tennessee Chattanooga), Jon Lauck, and the audience respond. Jeff Swenson's primary research focus is Midwestern Regionalism, including recent publications on authors Jim Tully, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J.F. Powers. Beyond regionalism, he is interested in material culture–particularly the canoe–and its influence on literature and culture, as with the work of Canadian First-Nations author E. Pauline Johnson. His most recent scholarly work considers representations of Autism Spectrum Disorder in popular culture, particularly television. Marcia Noe teaches courses in American literature and women's studies and is the Coordinator of the Women's Studies program. She is the author of Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland and over t

Matt Pehl, Assistant Professor of History at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Dr. Pehl specializes in twentieth century U.S. history, which a special interest in religion, race, gender, and working-class history. His book, The Making of Working-Class Religion, was published in 2016 by the University of Illinois Press.

Dave Page discusses the life and writings F. Scott Fitzgerald, in addition to, his latest work, F.Scott Fitzgerald In Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends At Home, published by University of Minnesota Press.

Andrew Jewell is a Professor of Digital Projects at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries and the editor of the Willa Cather Archive. Andy has published several essays on Willa Cather and other American writers, scholarly editing, and digital humanities. He is co-editor of the book The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and has edited, with Janis P. Stout, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather(Knopf, 2013). He also serves as co-editor of the open-access, digital journal Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing.

An interview with Scott Atkinson Editor-in-Chief of Belt Magazine and writing instructor at The University of Michigan-Flint. Scott is an award-winning journalist who has written for several publications including The New York Times, Vice, and Writer's Digest. He is also the editor of Belt Magazine and in 2016 edited Happy Anyway: A Flint Anthology from Belt Publishing.

Jon Lauck discusses The 49th annual Dakota Conference on the Northern Plains with Dr. Harry Thompson, Executive director for The Center for Western Studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE NORTHERN PLAINS: OBSERVING THE 500TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE REFORMATION The conference will be held April 21-22, 2017, in the CWS Fantle Building on the Augustana campus. This year’s theme The 49th annual Dakota Conference on the Northern Plains will examine the variety of religious expression in the region, both historical and contemporary. Approximately 80 presenters from as many as 15 states gather to present papers and participate in panels to at this two-day national examines issues of contemporary significance to the region in their historical and cultural contexts. Recent topics of interest have included western highways, regional identity, World Wars I and II, Wounded Knee 1973, and Spanish exploration of and Hispanic/Latino immigration to the region