Mapping the History of America’s Heartland

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times ran an article titled: “Where is America’s Heartland? Pick Your Map.” Framed by the claim that Americans were now “searching for its [the heartland’s] boundaries, after an election that pundits proclaimed cast the heartland against the rest of America,” the article began by asking readers where those boundaries lay. Which of ten suggested maps truly represented the heartland? Some of the top vote-getters included maps labeled “Non-coastal” (18 percent), “Where Trump won” (12 percent), “Farmland” (11 percent), and “Baseball fans” (11 percent). The selection of these choices, as well as the range of opinions registered by online readers, buttressed the authors’ claim that “The word captures an idea that is more expansive than the Midwest, harder to map than Appalachia, more evocative than the Great Plains.”¹

For an expert opinion, the authors asked historian William Cronon what he thought about the heartland. “It’s much more a state of mind than an actual place,” said Cronon. “It describes a deep set of beliefs about places that somehow authentically stand for America.” In that sense, noted the New York Times reporters, “the word is not purely about geography. It’s a value judgment.” Cronon again: “Who’s authentically from the middle? Who’s from implicitly the heart? Who represents the core?”

Who, indeed? The winner in the online polling was the map labeled “The Midwest” (22 percent), which handily beat even the category “Sorry, none of these do it for me” (14 percent).

The tendency to view the Midwest as the symbolic heart of the nation, to connect geography to values, has long predated the election that prompted the New York Times article. As the seemingly buffered core of the nation, the Midwest has stood for that which seems quintessentially national. This is especially true for the rural and small-town Midwest. In contrast to cosmopolitan coastal areas, borderlands, and world cities such as Chicago, the rural and small-town Midwest have been depicted as insular, local, bounded, isolationist, and exceptionally American (a condition egregiously conflated with whiteness).²

The tendency to write the rural and small-town Midwest off as some of the last local places, in league with Appalachia, helps explain why midwestern history lulled in the backwaters as US historians jumped on the cultures of US imperialism, transnational, and global history bandwagons.³ The newfound attention to the Midwest in the aftermath of the 2016 election has only underscored perceptions of the Midwest as a wellspring of xenophobia, wall building, white nationalism, and only America first principles. Although the New York Times map labeled “Where Trump Won” bears little resemblance to the map labeled “The Midwest,” these two geographies are all too often blurred in references to the heartland as their juxtaposition in the New York Times account suggests.

To counter simplistic and often stereotypical perceptions of the heartland, we need more sustained attention to the American Midwest, and to better understand the history of the Midwest, we need to confront the lasting grip of the heartland myth. Fortunately, after years of muddling along as the region not worth particular note, the Midwest now has a growing pool of advocates for a self-aware emergence from the analytical shadows. It also has new platforms for getting the word out. In 2013, Anne Trubek launched the online magazine Belt to promote complex and nuanced writing on the rust belt.⁴ The same year, Jon K. Lauck published a manifesto aimed at invigorating midwestern studies: The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History.⁵ Lauck’s vision and organizational energies helped lead to the formation of the Midwestern History Association and launch of the Middle West Review, both in 2014. The first-rate reporting and scholarly analysis found in such venues is helping to counter the heartland myth, in the process fostering more regional consciousness.

A quick look at recent scholarship reveals some of the ways that the “actual place” differs profoundly from the mythological “state of mind.” This scholarship has illuminated points that should have been spotlighted from...