Jon K Lauck

Call this history for historians, as Lauck is mostly interested in giving you a review of of Turneresque "Prairie History," the institutions that sustained it, and its ultimate fading away. Part of the problem is what you want to call the "Midwest," as Lauck would like to include the "Rust Belt" Great Lakes, in the region, but as a son of Northeastern Ohio I never really felt part of the agrarian chunk of the Midwest (Ohio barely counts). Another problem for the vision of history that Lauck was selling a decade ago is that "settler" has become even more of a dirty word, and I personally think that Indian "Removal" in the making of the reason doesn't get dwelt on enough (though that is changing). Be that as it may, most of Lauck's points are pretty well taken, except when he starts throwing a few jabs at the "Campus Radical" contingent on the coasts. Still, that he winds up finishing his book invoking both George Mosse's embrace of the region (Mosse being so not the typical Midwestern type) and Tim Snyder's "Bloodlands" (as an example of how things can go wrong in the absence of integration), are good grace notes.… (more)

5792. Heartland River A Cultural and Environmental History of the Big Sioux River Valley, Edited by Jon K. Lauck (read 30 May 2022) This book was published in 2022 and is the first book published this year I have read. It is a collection of articles pertaining sort of, to the Big Sioux River, which empties into the Missouri River at Sioux City. There are 19 separate articles, each by a different author. These articles are of varying interest, involving history, literature, politics, artists, water quality, and personal accounts. The Big Sioux River is 490 miles long and some of the articles don't have much to do with the river itself. It is a different kind of book and I am the first person to list the book on LibraryThing.… (more)