The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

Peoples

Peoples SECTION EDITOR Jon Gjerde 26414_U04.qxd 7/7/06 10:38 AM Page 177 Overview 179 Eighteenth-Century Native Americans 183 Woodlands 186 Plains 188 Métis 189 Nineteenth-Century Americans 190 Yankees/Yorkers 193 Middle Atlantic Europeans 195 Upland Southerners 196 French Canadians 198 African Americans 199 Early and Rural Nineteenth-Century Europeans 201 English 203 Scots 204 Welsh 205 French 206 Germans 206 Irish 209 Peoples of the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg) 211 Norwegians 212 Swedes 214 Danes and Icelanders 215 Swiss 216 Late Nineteenth-Century Europeans, Mexicans, and Asians 217 Balts 220 Greeks 221 Hungarians 222 Italians 224 Jews 226 Poles 228 Romanians 231 Slovaks 231 South Slavs 233 Czechs 234 Russians and East Slavs 236 Mexicans and Mexican Americans 238 Finns 240 Twentieth-Century Southern Migration 242 African Americans 245 Southern Whites and Appalachians 248 Late-Twentieth-Century Immigration 248 Asian Indians 251 Chinese 252 Japanese 253 Koreans 255 Filipinos 256 Vietnamese 257 Hmong and Cambodians 258 Lebanese 259 Other Middle Easterners 260 Urban Native Americans 262 Latino/as 262 Out-Migration 264 Section Contents 26414_U04.qxd 7/7/06 10:38 AM Page 178 Overview It is not too much to say that the broad outlines of the history of the Midwest are subsumed within the migration to the region and subsequent interaction of its peoples. One could also argue that one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the region is its ethnic and racial heterogeneity. No less an authority than Frederick Jackson Turner, in his influential 1893 essay on the significance of the frontier, wrote about the centrality and distinctiveness of the population of what he called the “Middle region (of the United States).” This area, which was entered by New York harbor, was distinct from regions to the north and south because of its wide mixture of nationalities. It was, Turner argued, “an open door to all Europe.” Yet it was also “a region mediating between New England and the South, and the East and the West. It represented that composite nationality which the contemporary United States exhibits,” Turner continued, “that juxtaposition of non-English groups, occupying a valley of a little settlement, and presenting reflection of the map of Europe in their variety.” This ethnic and racial diversity, Turner contended, extended to the Midwest. When he wrote specifically on the region in the early twentieth century, Turner focused on the diversity of the population in the Midwest with its New England, southern U.S., and European heritages. In Peoples v 179 outlining the Midwest’s transition from an agricultural “frontier” to an industrial colossus, Turner carefully classified the waves of migration and the interactions of peoples—including the Indian, the Yankee, the southerner, and the European—that shaped the region . The organization of this section follows the historical waves of immigration and settlement of peoples in the creation of the American Midwest. Historians today tend to use Turner as a foil to depict his implicit racism or his unsophisticated endorsement of American exceptionalism. Yet his observations about the peopling of the Midwest, the region of his birth and the region he knew best, are accurate. The history of the Midwest was deeply colored by a series of migrations that peopled and repeopled the region. Migrants from all corners of the globe have arrived, interacted, and often clashed with people already present . They have created communities and thereby contributed to the building of midwestern regional culture . Even after Turner’s death, moreover, the story continued as new waves of migrants entered the region to people its cities, towns, and countryside. Although Turner overemphasized the power of the midwestern environment to remake these peoples into assimilated Americans, he was right to argue that a region of ethnic and racial diversity was “typical of the modern United States.” The story of the peoples of the Midwest begins some twelve thousand years ago when the first human inhabitants entered the land that would become the Michoacán immigrants celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe feast day, St. Agnes Church, Chicago, 1998. Chicago Tribune photo by Kit Welling. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 26414_U04.qxd 7/7/06 10:38 AM Page 179 region. These indigenous peoples adapted to their environments and resource bases and developed a variety of strategies of subsistence from farming to hunting and gathering. They also made changes upon the land varying from...