Historian, Writer, Midwesterner
Folks are discovering Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s rural liberalism. It’s part of a deep-seated rural, Midwestern tradition that the national Democratic Party has ignored. Here’s how one bike trip flipped another rural district, like Walz’s, that hadn’t gone blue since the Great Depression.
Continue reading “How Democrats (like Tim Walz) Won the Rural Heartland”
Whether a relic of a bygone era or totally applicable lesson in Democratic messaging, there’s a historical example for how Midwestern Democrats responded when confronted with anti-abortion rhetoric.
Continue reading “How Democrats confronted the abortion issue in the Midwest”
Forget tax returns. RELEASE THE COLONOSCOPIES!
Continue reading “How old is too old for the Senate? Handshakes, Colonoscopies, and North Dakota”
How do you run an authentic, progressive, populist campaign that empowers grassroots activists across a state as geographically, occupationally, and (occasionally) ethnically diverse as Minnesota?
Go to Northfield to find the answer.
I joined the podcast “The Same, but Worse” to answer a few questions with burning relevance to modern American politics: What is “progressive populism?” How did Midwesterners respond to the economic challenges of the Farm Crisis and deindustralization in the 1980s? And, of course, which states are in the Midwest?
Continue reading “Can Left-Wing Populism Win in Democratic Politics?”
How do we find relevance in the New Deal when its sites have changed?
Continue reading “Reclaiming the New Deal: Digital Humanities and Minnesota History”
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?)
Continue reading “Barnstorming the Midwest: Northeastern South Dakota”
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!
Continue reading “WPA, Then and Now: Digital Humanities and Minnesota History, Pt. I”
Well, we’re not going anywhere for a while. And with classes cancelled or moved online, many of us are looking for ways to engage our history students beyond traditional online discussions and textbook-reading.
Here’s one way I do that with crowdsourced history projects that involve primary source learning, reinforce secondary source research, and assist local and national archives and history projects:
Continue reading “Crowdsourced History Projects in the Time of Social Distancing: A Virtual Classroom Project”
Amid the struggles–or indifference–to understand how conservative North Dakota could go for Bernie Sanders, a little history lesson explains why you shouldn’t be surprised, nor should you bemoan the death of the Democratic-Nonpartisan League.
Continue reading “North Dakota for Bernie. Again. And it’s nothing new!”