At HNN, historian David S. Brown discusses how he came to write his recent book Beyond the Frontier, which I mentioned in an earlier post: “Briefly put, reading [Richard] Hofstadter’s critics drew me into an exploration of a midwestern historical consciousness that went ‘beyond the frontier’ thesis popularized by [Frederick Jackson] Turner to reject American [...]

An interviewer asks Jonathan Franzen about what regionalism means for his work: “If you ask what the Midwest means to me, it’s that myth of an innocence prolonged and then abruptly lost… And somehow this dynamic seems more like a Midwestern thing than a Lower East Side thing or a South Boston thing. I’m not [...]

Augmenting the work of scholars of New Left history like Paul Buhle, David S. Brown’s Beyond the Frontier (Chicago) posits a Midwestern voice in American history “distinguished by a typology of progressive thought and politics.” The slim volume links Frederick Jackson Turner (b. 1861), Charles Beard (b. 1874), William Appleman Williams (b. 1921), and Christopher [...]