The sower and the seer : perspectives on the intellectual history of the American Midwest / edited by Joseph Hogan [and four others].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hogan, Joseph, 1992- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Intellectuals--Middle West--History.

Intellectuals.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxiii, 386 pages)

Place of Publication:

Madison, Wisconsin : Wisconsin Historical Society Press, [2021]

Summary:

"The Midwest has been characterized as an excellent seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. This collection reveals that representation to be false. More than just a springboard for the careers of future expatriates, the region has cultivated extraordinary intellectuals and allowed for the cross-pollination of a diversity of ideas. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations-to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland-and the tensions between those interpretations are made evident in this collection. These twenty-two essays contribute to recent revivals of interest in both Midwestern history and intellectual history. Spanning the era from the early 1800s to the late 1900s and covering nearly the entire Midwestern region, the essays examine individual thinkers, writers, and leaders-from four Anishinaabeg intellectuals who resisted settler colonialism to historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and from evangelist Charles G. Finney to regional writer Mari Sandoz-as well as movements and ideas that shaped the Midwest, including rural school consolidation, women's literary societies, Progressive-era urban planning, and Midwestern radical liberalism. While disparate in subject and style, these essays taken together establish the irrefutable significance of the intellectual history of the American Midwest"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Indigenous intellectuals and the colonization of the Midwest : Warren, Copway, Blackbird, and Pokagon / Edward Watts

"Education for the head, heart, and hands" : populism, progressive reform, and rural school consolidation / Kerry Alcorn

"A stamp of femininity" : the Sorosis Literary Society, women's intellectual discourse, and regional identity in Jacksonville, Illinois, 1865-1900 / Jenny Barker Devine

Charles G. Finney and the creation of the Midwestern evangelical mind / William Kostlevy

He flirted with Euterpe before he settled down with Clio : the education of Frederick Jackson Turner / Marcia Noe

"Invitation to the dance" : Robert Ingersoll, Dwight Moody, and the iconoclastic Gilded Age / Justin Clark

An easterner in the hinterland : Horace Meyer Kallen, the University of Wisconsin, and regional roots of cultural pluralism, 1911-1918 / Michael C. Steiner

Modeling "civic effectiveness" in the Midwest : Charles Mulford Robinson's Progressive Era urban planning, 1907-1915 / Brian M. Ingrassia

Agrarian "naturism" : Liberty Hyde Bailey and the Michigan frontier / John Linstrom and Daniel Rinn

"The mind and the soil" : an Iowa town that grows writers / Cherie Dargan

John C. Rawe and Midwestern agrarianism / Allan C. Carlson

Mari Sandoz : regional writer never at home / William C. Pratt

How the Midwest encountered mass consumer culture / Kenneth H. Wheeler

"No place for artistes" : James Jones's quest for authenticity in the postwar Midwest / Aaron George

Newton Minow, John Bartlow Martin, and the "vast wasteland" speech / Ray E. Boomhower

Cleveland's Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and Midwestern racial liberalism / Andrew Seal

How the Midwestern GOP encountered modernity : Robert Taft, mobility, and individualism / William Russell Coil

The fusionist mind of Stephen Tonsor / Gleaves Whitney

The rise and demise of rural and regional studies at Southwest Minnesota State University, 1977-2010 / David Pichaske and Emily Williamson

Midwestern literature and the literary canon : where, when, and how? / Sara Kosiba

The stars had become my stars : Leslie C. Peltier, Starlight nights, and amateur astronomy / Robert L. Dorman

George McGovern : an intellectual in politics / John Miller.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-87020-949-3