eBook

Barnstorming the Prairies

Jason Weems

2015

Overview

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.

• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Subject: 20th century / Aerial photographs / Aerial photography / Aerial photography -- Social aspects -- Middle West -- History -- 20th century / Airplanes / Airplanes -- Social aspects -- Middle West -- History -- 20th century / American / Art & Art History / Description and travel / History / In art / Landscapes / Landscapes -- Middle West -- History -- 20th century / Middle West / Middle West -- Aerial photographs / Middle West -- Description and travel / Middle West -- In art / Middle West -- Social conditions -- 20th century / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) / Regionalism / Regionalism -- Middle West -- History -- 20th century / Social aspects / Social change / Social change -- Middle West -- History -- 20th century / Social conditions
• ISBN: 0816677514, 9780816677511