| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. Ed. by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. x, 251 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-253-33941-3.)

The ten articles in this volume are from a conference at Miami University (Ohio) in 1998 entitled "Writing Regionally: Historians Talk about the American Middle West." The editors, Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray, argue that most Midwest historians share the burden of the assumption that a Midwest historian is a parochial regional or local historian (p. 149). In response, most Midwest historians strive to demonstrate "the national, even universal, significance" of their subject (p. 1). As a result, they fail to ground their work in a distinctive regional identity. To break through this conundrum, Midwest historians need to explore and cultivate a more distinctive Midwest regional identity. They need to do it by shifting from considering regional identity as a "setting" (p. 148) shaped by the interaction of economic and social structures and geography to exploring the efforts of midwesterners to develop regional identity through their pursuit of individual identity as they tried to "lo-cat[e] themselves intellectually and emotionally within complicated landscapes and networks of social relations" (p. 4).

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