Midwestern History: Today and Tomorrow

History moves in mysterious ways. Paraphrasing that great philosopher Yogi Berra, who said, “I just want to thank everyone who made this day necessary,” I would like to note here that I had a role in making this symposium possible. Jon Lauck was a student of mine at South Dakota State University—one of the best I had in three decades as a professor there. When I left teaching in 2003, his return to SDSU to teach my classes, including South Dakota History, led in a roundabout way to his later launching the Midwestern History Association (MHA). It occurred to him that, unlike all of its counterparts in the United States, the Middle West lacked an umbrella organization focusing upon the history of the region as well as having conferences, scholarly periodicals, college classes, textbooks, and other such accoutrements. Numerous scholars and writers were doing midwestern history, but little consensus existed among them regarding identity, subject matter, goals, and methods.

Lauck wrote two influential books describing how what once had been a flourishing regional historical and literary consciousness and a network of regional thinkers had gone into decline. In the meantime, he spearheaded the drive to establish the Midwestern History Association, which has borne excellent fruit during its brief history. The questions now facing the organization are: Where are we? and Where are we headed? This is an opportune time to creatively consider those and other issues concerning the direction in which we are going, five years into the development of the MHA.

Lest we assume that other regions of the country—New England (or the Northeast), the South, and the West—got started quickly, assumed a distinct identity, and established a clear set of goals and procedures for themselves, we should consider a statement by Donald Worster, who wrote in 1992 in Under Western Skies, “For a field that has been around so long, western American history can be frustratingly difficult to pin down.” He went on to observe that “as for clarity of purpose, the field is still groping about in adolescence. It doesn’t quite know who it is or what it wants to be when it grows up. What are its boundaries? Where is ‘West’ and where is not? There is no settled, mature answer.” Noting the “wonderful ambiguity” surrounding the field, Worster suggested that “the West is just about anything that anyone has ever wanted it to be.”

Participants in this symposium bring their own backgrounds, assumptions, and goals to the table. Doubtless, considerable diversity characterizes their visions, as well as significant overlap. One advantage of organizing a group like this is the variety of viewpoints and diversity of talents that it brings together. At the same time, it reveals some of the common assumptions and purposes that bind us together. In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013), Douglas Rushkoff points out that “pattern recognition is a shared activity.” In the process of collaboration, he observes, “a network of people is better at mapping connections than a lone individual. As author and social critic Steven Johnson would remind us, ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups, or what he calls ‘liquid networks.’” However we choose to conceive of it—as “liquid networks,” “collective groupthink,” or “collaborative imagination”—the combined insights of the company assembled here will operate like ripples in a pond, emanating outward from a rock thrown in the water to combine with numerous other ideas percolating in the minds of our participants and readers, who will bring their own thoughts and interests to the subject.

Philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks identified space and time as crucial components of the conceptual apparatus that allows us to comprehend the world around us. Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason placed those two ideas at the heart of his critical philosophy. Since then, historians and historical geographers have depended upon them to help direct their inquiries. Regionalism as an approach to knowledge builds upon the insight that “place matters.” In the process of establishing the MHA, the question of boundaries defining the extent of the region has...