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Barnstorming the Prairies
To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon-and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself.
Barnstorming the Prairiesoffers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America's agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood's iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision's fundamental contribution to regional identity-to Midwesternness as we understand it.
Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.
eBook
Fighting Invisibility
In Fighting Invisibility , Monica Mong Trieu argues that we
must consider the role of physical and symbolic space to fully
understand the nuances of Asian American racialization. By doing
this, we face questions such as, historically, who has represented
Asian America? Who gets to represent Asian America? This book
shifts the primary focus to Midwest Asian America to disrupt-and
expand beyond-the existing privileged narratives in United States
and Asian American history. Drawing from in-depth interviews,
census data, and cultural productions from Asian Americans in Ohio,
Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and
Michigan, this interdisciplinary research examines how post-1950s
Midwest Asian Americans navigate identity and belonging, racism,
educational settings, resources within co-ethnic communities, and
pan-ethnic cultural community. Their experiences and life
narratives are heavily framed by three pervasive themes of
spatially defined isolation, invisibility, and racialized
visibility. Fighting Invisibility makes an important
contribution to racialization literature, while also highlighting
the necessity to further expand the scope of Asian American
history-telling and knowledge production.
eBook
Chinese Americans in the Heartland
The term \"Heartland\" in American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke imageries of corn-fields, flat landscape, hog farms, and rural communities, along with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, and isolation. But as the Midwestern and Southern states experienced more rapid population growth than that in California, Hawaii, and New York in the recent decades, the Heartland region has emerged as a growing interest of Asian American studies. Focused on the Heartland cities of Chicago, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri, this book draws rich evidences from various government records, personal stories and interviews, and media reports, and sheds light on the commonalities and uniqueness of the region, as compared to the Asian American communities on the East and West Coast and Hawaii. Some of the poignant stories such as \"the Three Moy Brothers,\" \"Alla Lee,\" and \"Save Sam Wah Laundry\" told in the book are powerful reflections of Asian American history.
eBook
Visibility interrupted : rural queer life and the politics of unbecoming
\"A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Tied to the great packing machine
Ambitious in its historical scope and its broad range of topics,Tied to the Great Packing Machinetells the dramatic story of meatpacking's enormous effects on the economics, culture, and environment of the Midwest over the past century and a half. Wilson Warren situates the history of the industry in both its urban and its rural settings-moving from the huge stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City to today's smaller meatpacking communities-and thus presents a complete portrayal of meatpacking's place within the larger agro-industrial landscape.Writing from the vantage point of twenty-five years of extensive research, Warren analyzes the evolution of the packing industry from its early period, dominated by the big terminal markets, through the development of new marketing and technical innovations that transformed the ways animals were gathered, slaughtered, and processed and the final products were distributed. In addition, he concentrates on such cultural impacts as ethnic and racial variations, labor unions, gender issues, and changes in Americans' attitudes toward the ethics of animal slaughter and patterns of meat consumption and such environmental problems as site-point pollution and microbe contamination, ending with a stimulating discussion of the future of American meatpacking.Providing an excellent and well-referenced analysis within a regional and temporal framework that ensures a fresh perspective,Tied to the Great Packing Machineis a dynamic narrative that contributes to a fuller understanding of the historical context and contemporary concerns of an extremely important industry.
eBook
Hostile heartland : racism, repression, and resistance in the Midwest
\"Racist violence permeated the lower Midwest from the pre-Civil War period until the 1930s. From Kansas to Ohio, whites orchestrated extraordinary events like lynchings and riots while engaged in a spectrum of brutal acts made all the more horrific by being routine. Also forgotten is the fact African Americans forcefully responded to these assertions of white supremacy through armed resistance, the creation of press outlets and civil rights organizations, and courageous individual activism. Drawing on cutting-edge methodology and ... documentary evidence, Brent M.S. Campney analyzes the institutionalized white efforts to assert and maintain dominance over African Americans\"--Back cover.
Book
Apple Pie and Enchiladas
The sudden influx of significant numbers of Latinos to the rural
Midwest stems from the recruitment of workers by food processing
plants and small factories springing up in rural areas. Mostly they
work at back-breaking jobs that local residents are not willing to
take because of the low wages and few benefits. The region has
become the scene of dramatic change involving major issues facing
our country-the intertwining of ethnic differences, prejudice, and
poverty; the social impact of a low-wage workforce resulting from
corporate transformations; and public policy questions dealing with
economic development, taxation, and welfare payments.
In this thorough multidisciplinary study, the authors explore
both sides of this ethnic divide and provide the first volume to
focus comprehensively on Latinos in the region by linking
demographic and qualitative analysis to describe what brings
Latinos to the area and how they are being accommodated in their
new communities. The fact is that many Midwestern communities would
be losing population and facing a dearth of workers if not for
Latino newcomers. This finding adds another layer of social and
economic complexity to the region's changing place in the global
economy. The authors look at how Latinos fit into an already
fractured social landscape with tensions among townspeople,
farmers, and others. The authors also reveal the optimism that lies
in the opposition of many Anglos to ethnic prejudice and
racism.
eBook