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- Title
The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900 by Jon K. Lauck (review).
- Authors
Messer-Kruse, Timothy
- Abstract
Lauck concludes his chapter on the "Seamy Side" of the Midwest by distancing such racist violence from whatever is "midwestern": "hostility to Blacks could be found... especially in the southern tier of the Midwest and in the region's "Butternut" enclaves". (p. 21) Lauck highlights the liberal reformers who championed the civil rights of the Midwest's tiny Black minority, but in doing so tells only half the story and only the half that shines the cheeriest light on these progressives. For Lauck, the important figure is the overall increase in the Black population, as when he writes that Ohio's Black Laws "certainly did not stop African American immigration to Ohio [as the]... number of Blacks in Ohio grew from 337 to 36,000 by 1860." But curiously, of the writers and poets whom Lauck finds to be exemplars of such Midwestern pastoralism, no mention is made of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet and elevator operator whose brilliance soon attracted the patronage of two authors Lauck does profile: William Dean Howells and James Whitcomb Riley.
- Subjects
UNITED States history; PATRONAGE; PREJUDICES; AFRICAN American civil rights; MOBS
- Publication
Reviews in American History, 2023, Vol 51, Issue 1, p30
- ISSN
0048-7511
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/rah.2023.a900719