The sower and the seer : perspectives on the intellectual history of the American Midwest

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"The Midwest has been characterized as an excellent seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. This collection reveals that representation to be false....

"The Midwest has been characterized as an excellent seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. This collection reveals that representation to be false. More than just a springboard for the careers of future expatriates, the region has cultivated extraordinary intellectuals and allowed for the cross-pollination of a diversity of ideas. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations-to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland-and the tensions between those interpretations are made evident in this collection. These twenty-two essays contribute to recent revivals of interest in both Midwestern history and intellectual history. Spanning the era from the early 1800s to the late 1900s and covering nearly the entire Midwestern region, the essays examine individual thinkers, writers, and leaders-from four Anishinaabeg intellectuals who resisted settler colonialism to historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and from evangelist Charles G. Finney to regional writer Mari Sandoz-as well as movements and ideas that shaped the Midwest, including rural school consolidation, women's literary societies, Progressive-era urban planning, and Midwestern radical liberalism. While disparate in subject and style, these essays taken together establish the irrefutable significance of the intellectual history of the American Midwest"--

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