The Heartland by Kristin L. Hoganson

THE HEARTLAND is an American history written by Kristin L. Hoganson, the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Here, Hoganson argues that “our assumptions about the heartland are so deeply rooted that they can withstand counter-evidence howling as loud as the prairie winds.” At one point, she describes the heartland as “a psychic fallout shelter in which to seek refuge from a changing and dangerous world. … America bound the center of their country up in myth.”  Using Champaign, Illinois as a starting point, she explores themes of “human mobility, border brokering, economic ties, alliance politics, geographic awareness, and homeland insecurities.”  Her chapters discuss displacement of the Kickapoo people, foreign university students in the early 1900s, and an agrarian society’s relationships with the larger world. THE HEARTLAND received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly. That second review says, “Hoganson's book will attract many scholars as well as general readers who like innovative, challenging history,” but are those the readers who reside there and who may fail to appreciate the Native American and immigrant heritage, the global ties and connections described in this book?  

Hoganson herself notes, “Americans persist in imaging a heart” and she made me think of a quote from Breakfast Served Anytime by Sarah Combs: “right at the place the country’s heart would be if it placed its hand across its chest to say the Pledge of Allegiance,” referring to Kentucky. That in turn, led me to recent work by the Rockefeller Institute on individual states’ balance of payments. Just look at Kentucky (third from the bottom) which pays in a little over 30 billion dollars and receives over 70 billion, for a subsidy of around 40 billion, roughly nine thousand dollars per person per year. Yet, when we have a dialogue about “handouts,” the recipients are often characterized as people of color, even though Kentucky is more white (88% vs. 64% nationally) and native born (96 % vs. 87%) - also less educated (22% with bachelor degrees vs. 30%) - than the country. Overall, there is much more immediacy regarding economic and political issues in titles like the award-winning Heartland by Sarah Smarsh or The View from Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior. I frankly wonder to what extent ANY of us – whether we live in flyover country or not, really understand the heartland. Have we become too separated, too enmeshed in our own silos? What does that portend for democracy? Hoganson comments, “no wonder the heartland myth came to seem so commonsensical: its scaled up localness was far easier to grasp than the vast complexity of the real world.”