The Heartland: An American History

by Kristin L. Hoganson Narrated by Gabra Zackman

Overview

A history of a quintessentially American place — the rural and small-town heartland — that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world.

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

Struck by the gap between reputation and reality, she determined to get to the bottom of history and myth. The deeper she dug into the making of the modern heartland, the wider her story became as she realized that she'd uncovered an unheralded crossroads of people, commerce, and ideas. But the really interesting thing, Hoganson found, was that over the course of American history, even as the region's connections with the rest of the planet became increasingly dense and intricate, the idea of the rural Midwest as a steadfast heartland became a stronger and more stubbornly immovable myth. In enshrining a symbolic heart, the American people have repressed the kinds of stories that Hoganson tells, of sweeping breadth and depth and soul.

In The Heartland, Kristin L. Hoganson drills deep into the center of the country, only to find a global story in the resulting core sample. Deftly navigating the disconnect between history and myth, she tracks both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the land. A provocative and highly original work of historical scholarship, The Heartland speaks volumes about pressing preoccupations, among them identity and community, immigration and trade, and security and global power. And food. To listen to it is to be inoculated against using the word heartland unironically ever again.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

Listen closely and you can discern what makes Gabra Zackman such an accomplished audiobook narrator. Historian Hoganson uses her adopted home of Champaign, Illinois, to make her case that the Midwest has had a long historic relationship with the needs of foreign powers—especially Britain. From land ownership to hog species, the author shows just how important these needs were to the heartland of our nation. Zackman subtly shifts cadence and tone when the text switches from the author’s voice to historic news clips. Here Zackman’s reading is more fast paced. The news items add color to this work of revisionist history. As Zachman’s steady yet nuanced delivery propels the myth-busting forward, her subtle narration benefits both writer and listener. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/04/2019

In this sophisticated, complex work, history professor Hoganson (Consumers’ Imperium) uses the history of Champaign County, Ill., to explore and question the American myth of its “heartland” as a safe, insulated, provincial place—“the quintessential home referenced by ‘homeland security.’” The first chapter shows how white settlers in 1700s and 1800s emphasized local settlement to justify taking land from the mobile Kickapoo population of Central Illinois. Hoganson uses the raising of cattle and hogs in Champaign to trace shifting borders on the North American continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then she dismantles the myth of the isolationist heartland with an analysis of Champaign’s involvement with organizations such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the International Institute of Agriculture. And she flips the “flyover country” cliché, looking at how Champaign citizens are connected to the rest of the world by telegraph wires, the weather, migratory birds, and military planes. The final chapter follows the Kickapoo people’s experiences into the 20th century, demonstrating that, contrary to myth, nothing about the heartland’s geography makes it a safe place. Deeply researched with a well-proven argument, Hoganson’s book will attract many scholars as well as general readers who like innovative, challenging history. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

One of NPR's Best Books of 2019

“Fascinating and convincing . . . Hoganson is a marvelous writer. . . . [a] considerable achievement.” —The Wall Street Journal 

“An original contribution to the history of the region . . . in conversation with our contemporary moment.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[Hoganson is] clear and entertaining . . . [a] deeply researched book that will remain useful and readable long after the election cycle during which it's being published.” –NPR.org

“Well-illustrated and thoroughly researched . . . pleasingly provocative . . . Those inclined to take the Midwest for granted will think differently about it after browsing through this book.” –The Columbus Dispatch

“Awash in interesting and fresh information.” —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[A] sophisticated, complex work. . . . Deeply researched with a well-proven argument, [The Heartland] will attract many scholars as well as general readers who like innovative, challenging history.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A revelatory examination . . . [A] brilliantly reasoned, meticulously researched book, which refreshingly pushes against stereotypes at every turn. . . . With lively prose, Hoganson delivers an eye-opening, outside-the-box book that is mind-bending in all the right ways.” —Kirkus, starred review

“As broad and wide as the prairie itself, The Heartland challenges both national and global histories by proposing a whole new way of thinking about the nature of place. The heartland isn’t the isolated homeland of American myth, Hoganson argues; it’s a site of circulation, experiment, and renewal.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States  

“Kristin Hoganson paints an original and surprising portrait of the Midwest: international in every respect, from its peoples and its animals to its politics and its economics. The Heartland is a compelling history that forces us to rethink the global and the cosmopolitan, the regional and the particular.” —Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University

"In this brilliant and entirely original telling, Kristin Hoganson shows us the Midwest is not the tidy isolationist bastion of white picket fence Americana that informs still prevailing myths of the region as forgettable flyover country.  Through a series of deft and often surprising portraits of Native Americans and the coming of settler colonialism, the changing natural environment and the place of the region in the rise of American empire, she makes clear the heartland’s remarkable heterogeneity along with the global forces that gave its lands and peoples shape and form.  A transformative reconsideration of the Midwest and its place in the American story, The Heartland is a luminous work by a master historian at the very top of her game." —Mark Philip Bradley, The University of Chicago  
 
“Kristin Hoganson masterfully unpacks the myth of the American heartland, demonstrating that this geographic region has never stood in static isolation. The Heartland makes critical interventions in the study of empire, settler-colonialism, borderlands, and food systems. From swampland to pastoral landscape, this uneasy symbol of nativism in American politics must be understood in a global context.” —Mireya Loza, New York University, author of Defiant Braceros

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

Listen closely and you can discern what makes Gabra Zackman such an accomplished audiobook narrator. Historian Hoganson uses her adopted home of Champaign, Illinois, to make her case that the Midwest has had a long historic relationship with the needs of foreign powers—especially Britain. From land ownership to hog species, the author shows just how important these needs were to the heartland of our nation. Zackman subtly shifts cadence and tone when the text switches from the author’s voice to historic news clips. Here Zackman’s reading is more fast paced. The news items add color to this work of revisionist history. As Zachman’s steady yet nuanced delivery propels the myth-busting forward, her subtle narration benefits both writer and listener. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-01-16

A revelatory examination of America's "symbolic center in national mythologies."

After teaching at Harvard and living in the Washington, D.C., area, among other stops, Hoganson (History/Univ. of Illinois; American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents, 2016, etc.) found herself unexpectedly transplanted to the Midwest. Instead of readily accepting stereotypes of the nation's so-called heartland, she began mining the roots of many of these preconceptions. The result is this brilliantly reasoned, meticulously researched book, which refreshingly pushes against stereotypes at every turn. The author demonstrates how the stereotypes and myths about the heartland eventually became conventional wisdom. For decades, any attentive Midwesterner has known that Illinois is not Iowa, is not Missouri, is not Indiana, etc. However, even Hoganson had not realized the gap between reality and the lumped-together reputation of many of these states. For this book, she first began digging into data close to her new home in Urbana-Champaign, where the University of Illinois is located, and then moved beyond to explore community and national elements. Hoganson looked at practices that many conventional scholars have missed: how the raising of cattle for beef led Midwestern farmers to interact with markets around the world, how the raising of hogs for pork led to many of the same results, how most Midwestern voters have never subscribed to isolationist politics, and how so-called flyover country turned out to be anything but boringly flat and technologically backward. Consistently, the author persuasively argues that the term "heartland" must be retired; the geographic center of the United States, she writes, is pulsing with global connections, innovations, varieties of human experiences, and ecological diversity. Hoganson closes by reiterating how "the heartland myth came to be so commensensical: its scaled-up localness is far easier to grasp than the vast complexity of the real world."

With lively prose, Hoganson delivers an eye-opening, outside-the-box book that is mind-bending in all the right ways.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172169687
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/23/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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