Category: Midwest
Barnstorming the Midwest: Northeastern South Dakota
In 1985 the South Dakota Legislature voted to put all 105 of them, plus the governor, on chartered planes to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for action on the Farm Crisis. (Got all that?)
WPA, Then and Now: Digital Humanities and Minnesota History, Pt. I
As my students work on their final Citizen-Historian Project (read more here), I feel like it's only fair that I participate with them. So let's hit the Internet, hit our bikes, and log some New Deal sites around Minneapolis for the Living New Deal project!
North Dakota for Bernie. Again. And it’s nothing new!
To act as if the D-NPL firehouse caucus results are new, surprising, or out-of-character is borderline willful ignorance of the state's political heritage.
The Des Moines Register, Background Information…and the Election of 1982?
Dredging up offensive tweets from an Iowa State student whose sign went viral after College Gameday, spawning a grassroots philanthropic drive for a children’s hospital, the Des Moines Register once again reminds us of its past and present issues with sensational background details.
Barnstorming the Midwest: Ames
Far from being an isolated or parochial political movement, the progressive populists of the 1980s Farm Crisis had a wide-ranging vision to reform American agriculture and foreign policy. And to find out how? Go to Ames! Or click “Read More”!
Barnstorming the Midwest: Carbondale
Two of the biggest symbols in my dissertation are Paul Wellstone’s green bus and Russ Feingold’s painted garage. But they tapped into a deeper tradition of symbols and rhetoric in Midwestern liberalism, and I needed to go to southern Illinois to trace that backwards.
Barnstorming the Midwest: Stevens Point
Abortion, tensions with Native Americans, anti-labor sentiments, and rurality…and northern Wisconsin stayed in the Democratic column from 1969 until 2011. Why? I headed to Stevens Point, in part, to fill in my dissertation with two striking figures in Wisconsin political history, Dave Obey and Lee…
Barnstorming the Midwest: Fargo-Moorhead
Recapping my three trips (from November 2017 to August 2018) to Fargo and Moorhead, I’m committing one of the sins that I swore I wouldn’t commit during the fits and starts of this Barnstorming series — lumping interstate city clusters together. I held off for…
Rural/Urban/Suburban Divides: Spot the Difference!
We talk a lot in today’s day and age about the rural-urban divides that plague American politics. But where do those divides come from? Can we pinpoint their genesis?
Changes to the Wellstone Action Foundation: Paul Wellstone’s Legacy and the Minnesota DFL
What was, in February, an issue among Minnesota DFLers and progressives has suddenly become emblematic of the debate happening nationwide; this time, it centers on the legacy of Paul Wellstone and the Wellstone Action Foundation. MinnPost, MPR, and national outlets made news in mid-February with reports…
