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In a series of often highly personal essays, this book considers the question of regional identity as a useful way of thinking about the history of the American Midwest. The contributors begin with the assumption that Midwesterners have never been as consciously regional as their fellow Americans, east, south, and west. They note the particular absence of the Midwest from the recent revival of interest in American regionalism among both scholars and journalists. Drawing on personal experiences as well as a wide variety of scholarship, the authors consider what it means to be from the Midwest and why Midwesterners have traditionally been less assertive about their regional identity than other Americans.
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Susan Gray explores community formation among New England migrants to the Upper Midwest in the generation before the Civil War. Focusing on Kalamazoo County in southwestern Michigan, she examines how 'Yankees' moving west reconstructed familiar communal institutions on the frontier while confronting forces of profound socioeconomic change, particularly the rise of the market economy and the commercialization of agriculture. Gray argues that Yankee culture was a type of ethnic identity that was transplanted to the Midwest and reshaped there into a new regional identity. In chapters on settlement patterns, economic exchange, the family, religion, and politics, Gray traces the culture that the migrants established through their institutions as a defense against the uncertainty of the frontier. She demonstrates that although settlers sought rapid economic development, they remained wary of the threat that the resulting spirit of competition posed to their communal ideals. As isolated settlements developed into flourishing communities linked to eastern markets, however, Yankee culture was transformed. What was once a communal culture became a class culture, appropriated by a newly formed rural bourgeoisie to explain their success as the triumphant emergence of the Midwest and to identify their region as true America. |Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation.