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Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama'sLandscape and Memoryand Robert Pogue Harrison'sForests: The Shadow of Civilizationin exploring ways in which ourrelationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison'sTrue Northand Philip Caputo'sIndian Country.Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection.Imagining the Forestshows the origin and development of both.

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.

Brace yourself for a journey into a creepy, dark side of the American Midwest you thought you knew-a side teeming with real-life surrealism and historical horror-comedy. From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, Keven McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, the industry of grave robbing, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the colorful untold stories of the region and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature and our history. A fun and frightful look at a vein of darkness running through the Midwest, Horror in the Heartland promises to send chills down your spine.

Lourdes and Churchtown, Woden and Clio, Emerson and Sigourney, Tripoli and Waterloo, Prairie City and Prairieburg, Tama and Swedesburg, What Cheer and Coin. Iowa's place-names reflect the religions, myths, cultures, families, heroes, whimsies, and misspellings of the Hawkeye State's inhabitants. Tom Savage spent four years corresponding with librarians, city and county officials, and local historians, reading newspaper archives, and exploring local websites in an effort to find out why these communities received their particular names, when they were established, and when they were incorporated.Savage includes information on the place-names of all 1,188 incorporated and unincorporated communities in Iowa that meet at least two of the following qualifications: twenty-five or more residents; a retail business; an annual celebration or festival; a school; church, or cemetery; a building on the National Register of Historic Places; a zip-coded post office; or an association with a public recreation site. If a town's name has changed over the years, he provides information about each name; if a name's provenance is unclear, he provides possible explanations. He also includes information about the state's name and about each of its ninety-nine counties as well as a list of ghost towns. The entries range from the counties of Adair to Wright and from the towns of Abingdon to Zwingle; from Iowa's oldest town, Dubuque, starting as a mining camp in the 1780s and incorporated in 1841, to its newest, Maharishi Vedic City, incorporated in 2001.The imaginations and experiences of its citizens played a role in the naming of Iowa's communities, as did the hopes of the huge influx of immigrants who settled the state in the 1800s. Tom Savage's dictionary of place-names provides an appealing genealogical and historical background to today's map of Iowa.\"It is one of the beauties of Iowa that travel across the state brings a person into contact with so many wonderful names, some of which a traveler may understand immediately, but others may require a bit of investigation. Like the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, we have fallen in love with American names. They are part of our soul, be they family names, town names, or artifact names. We identify with them and are identified with them, and we cannot live without them. This book will help us learn more about them and integrate them into our beings.\"-from the foreword by Loren N. Horton\"Primghar, O'Brien County. Primghar was established by W. C. Green and James Roberts on November 8, 1872. The name of the town comes from the initials of the eight men who were instrumental in developing it. A short poem memorializes the men and their names:Pumphrey, the treasurer, drives the first nail;Roberts, the donor, is quick on his trail;Inman dips slyly his first letter in;McCormack adds M, which makes the full Prim;Green, thinking of groceries, gives them the G;Hayes drops them an H, without asking a fee;Albright, the joker, with his jokes all at par;Rerick brings up the rear and crowns all 'Primghar.'Primghar was incorporated on February 15, 1888.\"

J.L. Anderson seeks to change the belief that the Midwest lacks the kind of geographic coherence, historical issues, and cultural touchstones that have informed regional identity in the American South, West, and Northeast. The goal of this illuminating volume is to demonstrate uniqueness in a region that has always been amorphous and is increasingly so. Midwesterners are a dynamic people who shaped the physical and social landscapes of the great midsection of the nation, and they are presented as such in this volume that offers a general yet informed overview of the region after World War II. The contributors—most of whom are Midwesterners by birth or residence—seek to better understand a particular piece of rural America, a place too often caricatured, misunderstood, and ignored. However, the rural landscape has experienced agricultural diversity and major shifts in land use. Farmers in the region have successfully raised new commodities from dairy and cherries to mint and sugar beets. The region has also been a place where community leaders fought to improve their economic and social well-being, women redefined their roles on the farm, and minorities asserted their own version of the American Dream. The rural Midwest is a regional melting pot, and contributors to this volume do not set out to sing its praises or, by contrast, assume the position of Midwestern modesty and self-deprecation. The essays herein rewrite the narrative of rural decline and crisis, and show through solid research and impeccable scholarship that rural Midwesterners have confronted and created challenges uniquely their own.

\"I've never believed that living in one place means being one thing all the time, condemned like Minnie Pearl to wear the same hat for every performance.Life is more complicated than that.\" In this remarkable book of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings--home, town, countryside--of life in the Midwest.Like E.B.

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.

While the Midwest may be known for salt-of-the-earth folks, it's also home to murder and mayhem. In Murderous Acts: 100 Years of Crime in the Midwest , Keven McQueen explores a century of true crimes committed in 10 Midwestern states, from the 1840s to the 1940s. With a touch of gallows humor, McQueen relies on original research to recount infamous transgressions-including Michigan's Robert Irving Latimer case, the serial murders of Nebraskan Jake Bird, and the bloody deeds of Kansas's Bender family-as well as gruesome tales that are less well known, such as the Wisconsin man with a penchant for swinging an axe at the necks of men he didn't care for, the Hoosier who killed his sweetheart in the midst of a Halloween ball, and the French nobleman who wreaked havoc in a St. Louis hotel. Murderous Acts will intrigue and delight fans of true crime and will send a shiver down the spine of any reader fascinated by the dark history of America's Heartland.

This volume brings together articles that reveal the Archaic period of the American Midwest to be one of innovation and technological achievement.

The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians has been a part of Chicago since its founding. In very public expressions of indigeneity, they have refused to hide in plain sight or assimilate. Instead, throughout the city's history, the Pokagon Potawatomi Indians have openly and aggressively expressed their refusal to be marginalized or forgotten-and in doing so, they have contributed to the fabric and history of the city.Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicagoexamines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their \"Indianness.\" Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi.Imprintscontinues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.