The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture

Abstract

In the introduction to this absorbing volume, James Shortridge suggests that his "unconventional geography" (xiii) has been influenced by a small group of humanists within the profession.Certainly Shortridge's study of the Middle West is not what the lay reader ordinarily expects to encounter in the work of a geographer.In part this is because the scope and methodology of the discipline is broader than often believed, and in part because the author's approach to the subject is imaginative and eclectic.Shortridge's difficult task is to trace the identity and location of the Midwest over time.At the heart of midwestern identity, both within and outside the region, he finds an agrarian myth that has persisted even when clearly inconsistent with reality.As a result, periodic reassessments of the meaning and location of the region have been necessary.Shortridge believes that the idea of the Midwest as a distinct region originated in the late nineteenth century.Throughout much of the century, when Americans thought in terms of sections they meant the East, South, and West; what we now call the Midwest was known as the West, Northwest, Old Northwest, or Central Great Lakes.The designation Middle West probably came into use during the 1880s and was applied primarily to Kansas and Nebraska and, to a lesser extent, Iowa and Missouri.During the first decade of the twentieth century the term Middle West was applied to a wider region but with little consistency.Some used it to define an area from Omaha to Buffalo while others believed it should apply only to the Old Northwest Territory.Middle West came into its own as a regional designation around 1912.By that time most people considered the Middle West to consist of the five states of the Old Northwest, along with Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Missouri.At about the same time that the Middle West was developing a distinct geographic identity, according to Shortridge, it also began to 407