Bibliographical Essay
Scholars have framed the development of the Midwest as a meeting of cultures since the publication of Richard Lyle Power’s Planting Corn Belt Culture (1953). It is a theme that has been developed by numerous historians, including Nicole Etcheson in The Emerging Midwest (1996). While Etcheson focused on politics, she established the imprint of the Upper South in shaping the region. Kenneth Winkle’s study, The Politics of Community (1988), emphasized the high degree of population turnover in the region during the antebellum period.
For overviews of the agriculture in the Midwest from settlement to the contemporary period, consult John C. Hudson’s Making the Corn Belt (1994) and Dennis Nordin and Roy Scott’s From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur (2005). Hudson, a cultural geographer, emphasized the cultural background of settlers and, like Etcheson and Power, argued for the importance of the Upper South in shaping agriculture. Nordin and Scott depicted the development of the region as one of innovation and adaptation, emphasizing the positive aspects of farm modernization. While they acknowledged the human cost of technological advancement and associated depopulation of the countryside and collapse of communities, they celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of the region’s farmers and enthusiastically accepted the virtues of modern, high-tech, and high-capital agriculture.
Most historians of agriculture in the Midwest have written state-focused studies, with many of these devoted to explaining developments of the nineteenth century. The iconic example is Allan G. Bogue’s From Prairie to Corn Belt (1963). Bogue focused on Illinois and Iowa, addressing mechanization, livestock breeding, farm finances, and crop cultures. Robert Leslie Jones performed similar work for Ohio in A History of Agriculture in Ohio (1983). James Whitaker authored a pioneering study of beef cattle feeding in the nineteenth century, Feedlot Empire (1975). Like Bogue, Whitaker focused on developments in Iowa and Illinois. Doug Hurt’s The Ohio Frontier (1998) deals with settlement agriculture in the Ohio Country, while Paul Henlein’s Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley (1959) focuses specifically on the feeding systems, cattle trails, and early breeders in the region. Hiram Drache’s Day of the Bonanza (1964) traces the wheat boom in the Red River Valley of the North in the late nineteenth century. Doug Hurt’s Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (1992) demonstrated the power of slave-based commodity production and culture in the region. More recently, agricultural developments in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and Indiana were addressed in Kenneth E. Lewis, West to Far Michigan (2002) and Paul Salstrom, From Pioneering to Persevering (2007), respectively, both of which cover the nineteenth century. The social tensions that accompanied changes in harvesting technology were explored in Peter and Jo Ann Argersinger’s “The Machine Breakers: Farm Workers and Social Change in the Rural Midwest of the 1870s” (1984).
Three state-level studies covered the history of farming into the twentieth century. Both Earl D. Ross’s Iowa Agriculture (1951) and Merrill Jarchow’s The Earth Brought Forth (1949) described developments up to the publication dates. They are excellent traditional accounts of Iowa and Minnesota farming, although both were narrowly conceived and need updating not only in temporal coverage but also in terms of approach. In The Rise of the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin (1963), Eric Lampard demonstrated the importance of Yankees in shaping one of the region’s most iconic commodities up to 1920.
More recent studies have taken a broader view of production, engaging environmental history and the history of technology. J.L. Anderson’s Industrializing the Corn Belt (2009) deals with decision-making at the farm level regarding mechanization and chemical techniques, as well as the environmental influences and consequences of those decisions. Kendra Smith-Howard’s Pure and Modern Milk (2013), an environmental history of the dairy industry, is not limited to the Midwest but the author utilized significant material from the region. For a broad, regional, overview of the post-World War II period that reflects contemporary concerns in the discipline, see Smith-Howard’s essay “Economy, Ecology, and Labor” in The Rural Midwest since World War II (2014). The author emphasized the importance of the major commodity crops of corn and soybeans, while also recognizing the region’s agricultural diversity. Joshua Brinkman and Richard Hirsch explained the ways in which midwestern farmers positioned themselves as technologically savvy practitioners in “Welcoming Wind Turbines and the PIMBY (“Please in My Backyard) Phenomenon: The Culture of the Machine in the Rural American Midwest” (2017). Mark Finlay’s model study “Hogs, Antibiotics, and the Industrial Environments of Postwar Agriculture” explains the application of life-cycle housing and feeding in the hog industry.
There are numerous works that deal with various aspects of crop and livestock production and processing that shaped the region. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), while ostensibly about Chicago, is concerned with the relationship between the city and the rural regions that provisioned it, and in turn, served as a market for its goods and credit. Deborah Fitzgerald’s monograph, The Business of Breeding (1990) emphasizes the importance of Illinois institutions and people in the story of hybrid corn, arguing that the commercial seed companies were in an ideal position to translate public science into commercial goods. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode address agricultural science on the farm in Creating Abundance (2008). Decades earlier, two scientists published a significant work on the development of corn in the region: see Edgar Anderson and William L. Brown, “The History of the Common Maize Varieties of the United States Corn Belt” (1952). Two other studies—Norman L. Crockett’s Woolen Industry of the Midwest (1970) and Margaret Walsh’s The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry (1982)—are still valuable. For work on the canning industry see Derek Oden, “From Cob to Can” (2004) and Marcia Goldberg, “The Atlantic Canning Season of 1902” (1995). John Ashton’s A History of Jack Stock and Mules in Missouri (1924) provided an examination of an important but frequently overlooked part of regional agriculture.
The roles of minority groups in the region have been addressed by multiple scholars over the years. Dennis Valdéz’s account, Al Norte (1991) traces the story of Mexican workers in sugar beet production. More recently, Jim Norris explained the changing profile and fortunes of Hispanic workers in the region in his essay “Hispanics in the Midwest since World War II” (2014). Debra Reid’s “‘The Whitest of Occupations’?: African Americans in the Rural Midwest, 1940–2010” (2014) uncovers previously neglected stories of black farmers and the ongoing importance of land ownership and independence in the African American experience.
Community studies of the Midwest have flourished and have advanced our understanding not only of the region but of American society. One of the earliest of these was Merle Curti’s Making of an American Community (1959). Conceived as a test of Turner’s frontier thesis, Curti and his research team determined that the study area of Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County was a place of opportunity and a training ground for democracy as Turner had suggested.
While Curti’s exhaustive study was a landmark achievement, most scholars who engaged in community studies were less concerned about Turner and adopted different approaches. One of the influential of these was John Mack Faragher’s Sugar Creek (1986). Faragher demonstrated the potential of midwestern community studies to reflect social, economic, political, agricultural, and gender relations of the countryside in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Other notable studies of this sort include Susan Gray’s The Yankee West (1996), Susan Sessions Rugh’s Our Common Country (2001), and Richard Nation’s At Home in the Hoosier Hills (2005). All of these studies highlighted the importance of the cultural background of the settlers in shaping production for household and the market. They all focused on the mid-nineteenth century and, like Faragher, cited the importance the Civil War as a watershed in terms of agricultural production. Stephen Vincent’s study of African American communities in Indiana, Southern Seed, Northern Soil (1999), was also