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"Chicago is recognized around the world for its place in the history of jazz, gospel, and the blues. Far less known is the surprisingly important role Chicago played in country music and the folk revival. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Mark Guarino tells a forgotten story of music in Chicago and reveals how the city's institutions and personalities influenced sounds we today associate with regions further south. It is a story of migration and of the ways that rural communities became tied to growing urban centers through radio, the automobile, and the railroad. As the biggest city in the agricultural Midwest, Chicago became a place where rural folk could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, Chicago was the most active city for the genre's musicians and record labels. In the mid-1920s, the stars of WLS radio's Barn Dance modernized the sounds of country fiddlers and polished the mountain tunes of Appalachia for contemporary ears. By the 1940s, Chicago had the greatest concentration of country musicians in the US. Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry all recorded some of their most legendary music in Chicago. When the larger recording industry drifted to the coasts after World War II, Chicago became known for working folk musicians who could freely experiment, collaborate, and perform at a distance from the sometimes stifling star structure of Nashville's Music Row. Guarino tells the stories of the Chicago hustlers who evolved new strains of country music in the city's bars, punk clubs, classrooms, and auditoriums. The College of Complexes, The Gate of Horn, the Earl of Old Town, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Club Lower Links, and Lounge Ax served as creative incubators for different generations of music. Country and Midwestern is a story as vital as the city itself, a celebration of the colorful characters who kept country and folk moving forward, and of the music itself, which even today is still kicking down doors"--
At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern “squares” center stage—an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck’s cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.
This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.
Describes Indiana farm life during the thirties, and gathers traditional recipes for breads, soups, salads, meat, chicken, vegetables, desserts, and holiday meals
The Story of A Country Town is a novel by E. W. Howe, published in 1883 is a great read for anyone interested in the history of the Midwest. It was an immediate success upon publishing and went through many printings. It was reviewed favorably by Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. The action of the novel was placed in Twin Mounds, a fictional city in the American Midwest. It is free from the 19th-century optimism and elevated spirit of other town stories.
A remarkably fresh piece of Dylan scholarship, focusing on the profound impact that his Midwestern roots have had on his songs, politics, and prophetic character.
"Cayton and Onuf have tried to recapture a central place for region in our thinking while, at the same time, incorporating into their analysis the latest scholarship on gender, political behavior, etc. Theirs is a fine blending of the old and the new: old scholarship and new directions." —Malcolm J. Rohrbough "This is an ambitious work that . . . truly beongs on the 'must do' reading list of all midwestern and American historians." —American Historical Review " . . . an impressive interpretive work that will command the attention of regional historians and national scholars alike." —Illinois Historical Journal " . . . an excellent extended historiographic essay that seeks not only to locate the significance of the region created by the early land ordinance but also to raise issues for the historical examination of other regions of the country." —South Dakota History "What makes this book especially interesting and valuable is that it is informed by the post-modern scholar's view that knowledge can never be objective and eternally true; rather, it is subjective and socially constructed, shaped by the political, social, intellectual, and economic environments in which it is formed." —Western Illinois Regional Studies "The book's review of scholarship about the region is exhaustive, as well as brisk and lucid." —American Studies International " . . . a rigorous intellecutal analysis of the region's most important historiography." —Gateway Heritage " . . . an excellent book . . . " —The Annals of Iowa "What is impressive about this densely written work is the number of secondary works incorporated into the text and the importance of the authors' thesis of the considerable influence of happenings in the Midwest of the nineteenth century." —North Dakota History "There is . . . much to be praised in this book, and it will be frequently used and discussed by scholars of the early Midwest." —Journal of American History
In "Country Ragamuffins," Maxine Bergerson Werner invites readers on a journey back to the 1950s as she recalls her upbringing as the oldest girl among eight siblings in a Norwegian farming community in rural Minnesota. To convey and preserve the experiences, values, and character of a typical Midwestern farm family of the time "before those memories grow dim and finally disappear," the author offers this chronicle laced with humor and appreciation. Werners parents cultivated a lifestyle that combined hard work, learning, and time for childhood fun and play in the surrounding fields, pastures, and woodlands. Connectedness was the theme in their happy life. Every member of the family participated in the functioning of the farm; siblings were best friends; and laughter and debate were welcome at the dinner table. The daily routines, the chores, the holiday festivities, and the births of siblings are recorded in scrapbook fashion.