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Category: Research

How Midwestern Democrats confronted “the abortion issue”

How Midwestern Democrats confronted “the abortion issue”

In 1978 and 1980, on the Sundays before primary and Election Day, voters in some Midwestern states returned to their cars after church services to find a flyer tucked under their windshield or an activist waiting on the sidewalk just off church property to hand them a flyer whose message was unequivocal.

Barnstorming the Midwest: Ames

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

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

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 Dreyfus, known for different reasons: longevity and disruption, respectively.

Barnstorming the Midwest: Fargo-Moorhead

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 Duluth-Superior, in part because of the wide disparity in political experience between the Twin Ports (and in part because I wrote nothing for Duluth…yet). But we turn to sugar beet country, and time and tide…

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Barnstorming the Midwest (and Beyond): Where I’ve Been

Barnstorming the Midwest (and Beyond): Where I’ve Been

All these posts throughout my little “Barnstorming” series had me curious where I’d been (and how much I’d written): twenty-seven cities, thirty-plus archives, and almost 22,000 miles on my Ford Focus later. [Update: Happy 2019! I’ve added a few cities and a couple blog posts. Oh, and the car is about 500 miles shy of 70,000 that I’ve put on since May 2017. Enjoy!]

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