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The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 251. Maps. $35.00.)
Is midwestern regionality a viable analytical construct for historians to employ? The editors and contributors to this volume face this question squarely, even as they submit their contributions to the growing list of midwestern studies. Bringing together the insights of ten scholars who have written recently about historical subjects located in the American Midwest, the essays in this collection began as papers presented at an exploratory conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1998. Organizers and coeditors Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray invited participants "to write freely and informally" about "what they thought it meant to write 'Midwestern history,' or if they even accepted the existence, real or imagined, of such a genre" (1). The result, not unexpectedly, is a heterogeneous-but nevertheless rewarding-collection that gives readers a sense of the possibilities and challenges surrounding midwestern regionality as an interpretive framework.
A minor point of irritation for this reader: I could not discover any logic to the ordering of these essays. Beyond describing their introductory essay as an explication of what they see as the "master narrative of the Midwest" and a "a foil" for the "alternative tales" that follow (3), the editors do not discuss the volume's organization. If there is an internal logic to the arrangement of these essays, I simply missed it. What follows, then, is my own grouping based on what I perceive to be three allied approaches used by the contributors to respond to the editors' invitation.
Four out of eleven essays deal comprehensively with the problem of...