America's Hub of Global Trade and Culture Was and Is....the Midwest?

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the D.C. 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.

I’m speaking to Hoganson today, who is author of the book The Heartland: An American History. She tracks both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the land.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Crypto doesn't sleep, so neither do we.
0:04.0	Crack-and-client support is available 24-7, 365 days a year by call, chat, or email.
0:11.0	We're here for you whenever you need us.
0:14.0	Give us a shout at crackin.com forward slash support proof, not investment advice.
0:19.0	Crypto trading involves risk of loss.
0:30.0	History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.
0:37.0	It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.
0:43.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.
0:52.0	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:01.0	I've mentioned in the past on this podcast that I'm from Iowa, which has a reputation of being a slightly backwards country bumpkin farm state.
1:10.0	In that view, as partially fair, we do have a state fair every year where a cow is made out of a one-tonged gigantic block of butter.
1:17.0	But I've also argued on this podcast that Iowa has made incredible contributions to global civilization, it standardized the English language,
1:25.0	saved billions of people from starvation in the 20th century due to innovations in agriculture,
1:29.0	our optimism and tinkering spirit created Silicon Valley.
1:32.0	We have incredible political power to the Iowa caucuses.
1:35.0	And lastly, in most counterintimidly, we are the multicultural capital of the world due to the many utopian communities that took root here in the 19th century.
1:42.0	This episode will be further dispelling some of the ideas of the Midwest as being this backwater bastion.
1:48.0	And I'm welcome by guest, Chris and Hoganson, who's the author of the book, The Heartland in American History.
1:53.0	An idea of the Midwest is a place where the United States exists in its most pristine, unadulterated form,
2:00.0	and it's sort of a holdout from the world that's globalizing and it's left it behind with its studio apartments and tram lines.
2:07.0	But as Chris and explains, that's not the case.
2:10.0	Originally, the Midwest was occupied by the Kikapus, an Algonquin people who roamed through the Midwest and Canada.
	...

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