Jacob Hiserman on *David S. Brown, Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing*

“Flyover country.” “Lost region.” Both are dour phrases describing the Midwest. Jon Lauck used the latter phrase as a title for his 2013 book calling for a renaissance of historical study of the Midwest. Four years before Lauck’s Lost Region, David S. Brown asserted in Beyond the Frontier that the Midwest has always been a central corridor, a hidden yet essential province in America. He saw it as a significant place because Midwestern historians between 1896-2008—including some leading lights in American intellectual history—profoundly shaped the historical profession.

Those historians did not merely happen to all hail from the Midwest; the region as a place was a key factor in their historical analysis. Brown uses that claim as his central argument: a coherent “Midwestern historical persuasion” or “tradition” exists (xiv, 190). In this tradition, the historians’ ideas drawn from their Midwestern lives led them to champion populist or reform politics, critique unbridled capitalism, and argue for a healthy civic life against the perennial threat of American imperialism. Why was this three-pronged challenge important? Brown maintains it shaped Americans’ identities which are commonly built around concepts such as progress, democracy, empire, and character and it demonstrated the historical profession always lacked consensus. Indiana native Charles Beard propounded an anti-capitalism, historical relativism, and foreign-policy isolationism contrary to the objectivist, hawkish Eastern historians. Nebraska-raised Merle Curti (an early intellectual historian who contended for the social or cultural shaping of ideas against Lovejoy) and Iowa-bred William Appleman Williams worked within the Beardian vein in the 1940s through 1970s. Omaha-born Christopher Lasch argued against capitalism’s destruction of the family and its marriage with the warfare state but also in favor of the noble populist warriors who battled capitalism’s ravages. Curti, Williams, and Lasch articulated progressive political aims against the emerging liberal consensus in the post-World War II United States. Place matters because early twentieth-century reform-minded Midwest towns intimately shaped the thinking of those historians.

Almost all roads of reform led to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Beyond the Frontier. (Curti and Williams were professors there; Lasch is an exception to this maxim). With Madison as the persuasion’s ground zero throughout the book, Brown provides a convincing argument for the unity of the Midwestern historical tradition. His chapters on Curti and Lasch are great cases for the centrality of the Midwest to the development of American intellectual history. Finally, Brown reminds us of the importance of fighting for a healthy civic culture rooted in the places we inhabit just as Beard, Williams, and Lasch did. This is a way the “Midwestern historical persuasion” Brown identified moves us “beyond the frontier”: past Turner’s famous thesis about the Midwest as a region and into a realm where the Midwest’s intellectual heritage is a central piece of the American life of the mind.