The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier / Edition 1

by Susan E. Gray

Overview

Susan Gray explores community formation among New England migrants to the Upper Midwest in the generation before the Civil War. Focusing on Kalamazoo County in southwestern Michigan, she examines how 'Yankees' moving west reconstructed familiar communal institutions on the frontier while confronting forces of profound socioeconomic change, particularly the rise of the market economy and the commercialization of agriculture. Gray argues that Yankee culture was a type of ethnic identity that was transplanted to the Midwest and reshaped there into a new regional identity. In chapters on settlement patterns, economic exchange, the family, religion, and politics, Gray traces the culture that the migrants established through their institutions as a defense against the uncertainty of the frontier. She demonstrates that although settlers sought rapid economic development, they remained wary of the threat that the resulting spirit of competition posed to their communal ideals. As isolated settlements developed into flourishing communities linked to eastern markets, however, Yankee culture was transformed. What was once a communal culture became a class culture, appropriated by a newly formed rural bourgeoisie to explain their success as the triumphant emergence of the Midwest and to identify their region as true America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807846100
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/25/1996
Edition description:	1
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.55(d)
Lexile:	1430L (what's this?)

About the Author

Susan E. Gray is assistant professor of history at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface
Introduction. The Yankee West and the "Universal Yankee Nation"
1. Those Desirous of Removing to the Kalamazoo: The Designs of Settlement
2. This Walking before Creeping Will Never Answer: The Necessary Market
3. The Unhallowed Dicker Traffic: The Necessary Neighbors
4. Spoiling the Whole: Families and Farming
5. A Pretty Joining of God and Mammon: Religion and Community
6. All of the Whiggs and Some of the Democrats: Politics and Community
Conclusion. The Foundations of an Empire
Appendix
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Creates a detailed portrait of an otherwise underdocumented site of westward expansion. . . . Will enhance the work of other scholars about the competing ethnic identities forged on the nineteenth-century American frontier.—Journal of Interdisciplinary History



Gray provides an innovative and sophisticated look at the complex interplay of individual, family, community, and national influences on western development.—American Historical Review

Editorial Reviews

Creates a detailed portrait of an otherwise underdocumented site of westward expansion.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

[P]rovides an innovative and sophisticated look at the complex interplay of individual, family, community, and national influences on western development.

American Historical Review

From the Publisher