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  • The Midwest and Early American History
  • Donald R. Hickey
David Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Read to Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 460pp. $29.95.
Colin Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 214pp. $24.95. [End Page 147]
Patrick Bottiger, The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 244pp. $50.00.
Mary Elise Antoine, The War of 1812 in Wisconsin: The Battle for Prairie du Chien. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. 287pp. $29.95.
David Andrew Nichols, Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Expansion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 254pp. $32.95.
John Reda, From Furs to Farms: The Transformation of the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. 201pp. $38.00.
Peter Shrake, The Silver Man: The Life and Times of Indian Agent John Kinzie. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. 165pp. $14.95.
Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 391pp. $34.95.

Scholarly interest in the history of the Midwest originated in the late nineteenth century, stimulated in part by the enormous influence of Frederick Jackson’s Turner’s seminal paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which he delivered in 1893 at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in Chicago. “The true point of view in the history of this nation,” he said in that paper, “is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West.” Turner’s call coincided roughly with the publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s popular 4-volume work, The Winning of the West (1889–96), which was devoted almost entirely to the Trans-Appalachian West and especially the Midwest.

Turner’s pronouncement was followed by the proliferation of PhD programs at midwestern universities, where faculty and students, using readily accessible local sources, produced a growing body of monographs exploring the local, state, and sectional history of the region. Most of these works are still serviceable today. Of special note are two broad studies of the Old Northwest that represent a kind of culmination of this phase of the [End Page 148] historiography: Beverly W. Bond Jr., The Civilization of the Old Northwest: A Study of Political, Economic, and Social Development, 1788–1812 (1934), which makes good use of contemporary newspapers; and R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840 (two volumes, 1950), which is full of valuable information. Seeking a greater voice in the profession, historians in the region in 1914 established an association that produced a journal, the Mississippi Valley Historical Journal.

Although the field of midwestern history was well-established by World War II, thereafter it went into eclipse. The huge growth of graduate programs in other parts of the nation, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with the emergence of new fields of study, pushed midwestern history into the background. In truth, the elite schools in the East had never lost their dominant position nor their interest in eastern history. Students of colonial and early national America who practiced the newer forms of history—quantitative history in the 1970s and the history of race, class, ethnicity, and gender more recently—have had no trouble finding congenial topics in the East. Reflecting these changes, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1964 was retitled the Journal of American History.

Recently, midwestern history has enjoyed something of a revival. One reason is a growing belief that events in the West shaped broader government decisions. As François Furstenberg has put it, “rather than imperial capitals imposing their will on the populations of distant peripheries, the actors on those peripheries impose their will on policymakers in the center” (Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 [June 2008], 653). Some of the credit for this revival must also go to historian Jon Lauck. An indefatigable advocate of the history of the Midwest, Lauck is the author of several books on the...

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