The State We're In: Reflections on Minnesota History

ANNETTE ATKINS

Welcome to Minnesota

The State We’re In

In 1958, Minnesota’s hundredth anniversary of admission to the Union, the state pulled out all the stops to celebrate. The Statehood Centennial Commission had worked for more than two years to get Minnesotans primed and excited about the centennial. Efforts included producing a short film, Everybody Ready? Let’s Go, and organizing the Women’s Committee, local and county committees, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Among the notable centennial accomplishments were the Centennial Train, which visited every county except Cook (no railroad tracks); commemorative medals, ashtrays, posters, pins; the Miss Centennial pageant; and a new centennial song and record album. The state underwrote publication of the Gopher Reader (a Minnesota history magazine for kids), as well as a centennial cookbook and books about Minnesota’s artists and writers. The state also subsidized local events, exhibits and competitions at county fairs and at the State Fair, and the installation in the U.S. Capitol of two busts—one of Minnesota’s 1930s Governor Floyd B. Olson and the other of educator Maria Sanford. Entertainer Judy Garland headlined Statehood Week. A bit belatedly (in 1963), the University of Minnesota Press published Theodore Blegen’s Minnesota: A History, the most important new state history since William Watts Folwell’s four-volume A History of Minnesota, published in the 1910s and 1920s.¹

Minnesotans celebrated the centennial not just from the top down. They visited the touring train; bought the medallions; put together their own local picnics, parades, and pageants; and published their own community cookbooks and church histories.

Twenty-five years later, in 1983, the state’s birthday came and went without much notice, signaling not so much party fatigue as a changed historical landscape. In the decades since the centennial, the civil rights movement gained significant momentum; the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis in 1968; and two important books found wide popular and scholarly readership: John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1961) and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). South Dakota’s Second Battle of Wounded Knee in 1973 taught many people about the first battle in 1890. In short, the Native American perspective on American and state history, nearly invisible to most Minnesotans in 1958, was blazingly, sharply evident.²

In the intervening years, the historical profession—like the rest of American society—had changed dramatically. Historians had both been shaped by the new movements and contributed to them, so that our judgment about what was worth studying had expanded radically. Our work came to be full of new history—new social history, new labor, new economic, new intellectual, new, new, new. We redefined what and who we ought to study and know. We took to studying different perspectives: the American Revolution from the view of women, slavery from the view of the slaves, economic structures from the view of laborers. More than that, historians—more of us women, minorities, and working class—traded in our earlier role as patriotic cheerleaders to become critics. We abandoned the all-is-progress narrative approach to the past and concentrated on its shadow side: the long specter of slavery and racism, Japanese internment camps, the toll that American empire has taken and inflicted, the inequalities imposed by class, gender, and sexual preference, and—perhaps most important for state history—the dispossession and subjection of Native Americans. For historians of the United States, these decades proved to be an intellectually expansive, sprawling, and fertile time.

The field of state history, however, lost its way. While many states continue to require that students study their home history—in Minnesota it is part of the sixth-grade curriculum—and while many primary and secondary schoolteachers in training take the subject in college, few historians any longer claim to be state historians, even if they do teach the subject. Those who do teach it no longer share a common understanding of what state history is. As the state crept up on its 150th birthday to be marked in 2008, historians, then, wondered and worried even about what kind of observance the state would launch.

Even without the historians’ concerns, the state’s economic situation in the early 2000s guaranteed that the commemoration would be a low-key event. In those years, substantial cuts in state funding hit almost every part of the state budget, including the Minnesota Historical Society. The state did name a Sesquicentennial Commission and allocated an equivalent of about one-eighth the budget of fifty years earlier.

The roles that Historic Fort Snelling played in the 1958 and 2008 events demonstrate the different climates. Centennial legislation, in the corona of World War II, allocated funds specifically for sprucing up the fort that had played a key role in American wars for a century. The sesquicentennial legislation said nothing about the fort, but, beginning in 2005, a group of Dakota people and their allies called for tearing the fort down in the name of decolonization and justice. At Fort Snelling the U.S. government in the winter of 1862–63 interned Dakota people, mostly women and children, subjecting them to disease and starvation before expelling them from the state.³

Leonard Wabasha, member of the Lower Sioux Dakota community, explained, A lot of Indians don’t see the sesquicentennial as something to celebrate.… It’s just another year and an anniversary that reminds us of what was taken away, and what we lost. Sensitive to this issue, Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant argued that Minnesota would do well to acknowledge that there were people living on this land long centuries before 1858.⁴

Early in 2008 Secretary of State Mark Ritchie announced that this truly will be a great celebration of what it means to be a Minnesotan. Jane Leonard, the part-time and underpaid executive director of the state’s 150th anniversary project, with a small (mostly volunteer and part-time) staff and no paid county coordinators, worked with the Sesquicentennial Commission to drum up interest. They made sure that activities happened statewide, at the State Fair, and at the state capitol. Leonard and her staff administered a grants-in-aid program that funded something in nearly every county. Throughout her tenure, she found herself in the middle of often heated controversy.⁵

Centennial (1958) logo, with its engine of progress roaring into the future, and the more neutral sesquicentennial version (2008)

In side-by-side newspaper commentaries in 2008, historian Jeff Kolnick of Southwest Minnesota State University and Minnesota Historical Society director Nina Archabal, both relative moderates on the issues, traded viewpoints on Fort Snelling. Kolnick argued that the genocide of the Dakota people is part of a larger story of violence and ethnic cleansing common to every state in the union and proposed that the fort be moved and replaced by a Minnesota Museum of Genocide. Archabal wrote that Minnesotans have a responsibility to preserve Fort Snelling and to absorb the full scope of its history and meaning. On May 10—statehood day—one group of Minnesotans was (literally) trying to light candles on the state’s birthday cake while another group held up Take Down the Fort placards.⁶

Recalling the hoopla of 1958, Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman declared the 2008 event—license plates, commemorative stamp, and a week of capitol for a day visits to outstate locations—a snooze and the dullest 150th birthday on record. Even the plan to fire off a cannon at the capitol in St. Paul was squelched by the fear that the shell’s report might damage nearby state buildings.⁷

One highlight of the sesquicentennial year was an exhibit, still on view in 2010 at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, titled Minnesota at 150: The People, Places, and Things that Shape Our State. Based on nominations from the public and shaped by the Minnesota Historical Society’s staff into an engaging visual feast, the 150 Minnesota things range from a cutaway of a Greyhound bus to a reproduction of the Jeffers petroglyphs; from recordings of Minnesota’s great choirs to early examples of medical devices developed in the state to speeches of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The exhibit aims to include as many points of view as possible and to avoid taking a position that could be construed as political—that is, neither for celebration nor against it.⁸

The Minnesota Historical Society Press also published a new history of the state, my Creating Minnesota: A History from the Inside Out, in which, as one of those new historians, I re-imagined what state history could and should be. First, I rethought who we are and whose story counted. Yes, I include Henry Sibley and Hubert Humphrey and many familiar Minnesotans. I also counted legions of women and laborers, photographers and farmers, Yankees and immigrants, Dakota and Ojibwe and Ho-Chunk people, politicians and doctors, sugar-beet workers and seamstresses, failures and successes—Minnesotans all. I presumed that all of them contributed to the making and breaking of Minnesota.

Most state historians focus closely on the state itself, of course, and like them I recognize that however much the landscape at any state border melts into the landscape of its neighbors, a state results from a particular set of conditions and historical facts. No one fact is unique, but different sets of facts add up to different cultures and societies and mythologies. For example, Minnesota and Iowa and Texas all have strong agricultural economies, but other facts they don’t share: Twin Cities and the Iron Range in Minnesota, Des Moines and the Iowa Writers’Workshop; oil and the Texas Longhorns. These combinations are what make places distinctive. Creating a life in Minnesota, therefore, offers some different opportunities, ideas, limitations from creating one in either of those other two places. When novelists locate a character in a Minnesota background, they mean something different from placing that person in Texas or Iowa. Even so, unlike my state historian forefathers, I was not looking for what made Minnesota the shining star of the North or what made us exceptional or special, but how Minnesota speaks its part in the regional, national, and international narrative.

I talk about history as story and stories. I use these terms not as a writer of fiction would but as a historian, and I mean an account of the past grounded in the historical evidence. The evidence—newspapers, photos, maps, letters, genealogy, clothing, furniture—reminded me that for all of us life is a mix of celebration and grief and accomplishments and shadows. The evidence insisted that this truth shape the entire account of Minnesota’s past.⁹

Between 1958 and 2008, many historians have worked on Minnesota topics or case studies. This group’s work is varied and dynamic. The sesquicentennial provided an occasion to draw some of these people together to see where the study of Minnesota has traveled in the last generation and how we have taken account of new ideas and practices. Funded in part by a generous private donation to Saint John’s University and by the State Sesquicentennial Commission, several organizations—saint John’s University, the College of Saint Benedict, Stearns History Museum, and the Minnesota Historical Society—sponsored a conference in Collegeville titled The State We’re In: Critical and Creative Approaches to Minnesota at 150. All of what appear here as essays were originally delivered orally—one of the pleasures of a conference—and within tight time constraints—one frustration of conference-going. These origins account for the brevity of many of the articles, their variety in format, style, voice, and scholarly scaffolding. Each essay, then, tells much less than their authors know, and many are parts of what are longer works. In organizing and presenting the essays here we have not replicated particular conference sessions but have instead adopted a structure that emerged out of the themes raised at the conference. Not themes we might have expected, but ones that suggest some of the directions in the current scholarship.¹⁰

The collection begins with two reflections on state history. One is by twentieth-century U.S. historian James H. Madison, who is the author of a two-volume history of Indiana, co-editor of the Midwestern History and Culture Series for Indiana University Press, and former editor of Indiana Magazine of History. Madison’s publications have taken Indiana-located topics and cast them as American history: A Lynching in the Heartland, biographies of Eli Lilly and Wendell Willkie, and Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys (about a World War II Red Cross volunteer). He has been one of the strongest and best voices for the intellectual and cultural significance of the categories of state and region.

The author of our second essay, historian Paula M. Nelson, comes to American history through the particular and the local. Her first two books, After the West Was Won and The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own, examine just over thirty years of life in the sparsely populated western half of South Dakota. Her most recent book, Sunshine Always, is an edited collection of courtship letters exchanged by a South Dakota couple. Her essay in The State We’re In offers a spirited defense of what others might call small but what Nelson sees as rich and textured history. Nelson and Madison—and other authors in the collection—fundamentally speak to the question of what is worth studying and knowing. Collectively, they offer expansive and generous answers.

Not surprisingly, about a quarter of the papers at the conference addressed Native American topics. One of the best-attended sessions considered the legacy of Native American treaties in Minnesota. This topic has had a particularly electric charge in the last two decades as historical scholarship—including significant contributions by historian and anthropologist Bruce White, whose essay is included here—has been employed to protect and reclaim artifacts, human remains, hunting and fishing rights, and land.¹¹

The other best-attended session focused on the Kensington runestone, a topic that for a hundred years has stirred up people’s emotions. Professional historians have repeatedly dismissed as a fraud the runic stone found in a field in Douglas County and displayed for years in Alexandria. Believers, however, have enthusiastically defended its authenticity. Minnesota historian and former longtime Minnesota Historical Society director Russell Fridley was the nay-saying professional on our panel, but his voice was small and his allies few in the face of the stone’s many passionate defenders, including Michael Zalar, whose essay is included here. (Even that anti-Minnesotan from up north, Bob Dylan, showed his true Minnesota stripes in his autobiography when he recounts: I told [Bono] … if he wants to see the birthplace of America, he should go to Alexandria, Minnesota.)¹²

Writers and poets offer significant accounts of their—and by extension—our lives. Furthermore, much of what people think about a place grows out of that place’s literature, so we were particularly happy to hear—and include here—poems, a short story, and excerpts from a memoir by three fine Minnesota writers: Louis Jenkins, Matt Callahan, and Marge Barrett. They contribute handsomely to Minnesota’s story and remind us of the state’s rich literary heritage.

The four themes that emerged in the conference organize the essays here: memory, up north, identity, and method.

In the last generation, memory studies have taken the discipline by hurricane, as historians have become increasingly conscious of history as constructed and having a perspective. At the same time, memoir writing has flourished as a literary form in the United States. Our writers use different methods to make sense of the past. In our Memory section, German historian Gregory Schroeder provides an introduction to memory studies. Two essays take up Native American issues—Bruce White looks from the perspective of forgotten treaties and Nora Murphy offers a memoir or meditation of remembering her family’s past and the charged landscape of those stories. Melodie Andrews gives a history of how one place has remembered the U.S.–Dakota War in 1862, the hanging of thirty-eight men, and the exile from the state of most Dakota people. Patrick Nunnally introduces us to a University of Minnesota project to collect stories about the long-neglected river at its feet. Marge Barrett’s memory of the flood of her childhood conjures up family and community life in another time in a small town that, in her evocation, feels familiar, even if we have never been there.

While we, the editors, have our own love affair with northern Minnesota, we had not anticipated the rich vein that the Minnesota at 150 historians would mine there. The Up North section emerged, then, as if by popular demand, and it highlights one of the truths of Minnesota history: the north-south divide. Twin Cities’journalists often refer to outstate or greater Minnesota, highlighting a regional division of urban and rural. These essays suggest that a more revealing division could well be north and south Minnesota. The economy of the north, unlike the economy of the south, has never revolved around the production or processing of food (except fish). Most of Minnesota’s Germans and Scandinavians and Yankees settled elsewhere, leaving the mines and scrubland and the trees and water for southern and eastern Europeans, Finns (who are not Scandinavians, after all), labor radicals, industrial laborers and miners, and the tourist industry. While other parts of Minnesota seesaw between being Republican and Democratic-Farmer-Labor, northern Minnesota remains remarkably dfl (even after the cleft that the abortion issue rent in the traditional dfl coalition of laborers, Catholics, and feminists). Reflecting the nature of the northland, the authors in the Up North section offer us a richly diverse set of observations. Louis Jenkins, originally from Oklahoma, shares his own history of Duluth, the gate to the northland. Linda LeGarde Grover’s account takes the reader on a specifically Ojibwe path through family and craft to identity. Linda Mack Schloff explores the world of Jewish women up north, how they did or did not fit in, accommodated, and took care of their community and each other. Barbara W. Sommer shows the experiences of African Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Michael Zalar argues for the runestone. Together these essays capture key elements in northern Minnesota.

The Identity section of essays takes up a question that many Minnesotans—Sinclair Lewis, Louise Erdrich, Ole Rølvaag, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Gerald Vizenor, the Coen brothers, Garrison Keillor—have wrestled or played with: Who are we Minnesotans? Some say that one part of what makes us Minnesotan is how much we speculate about this issue, but identity rarely comes from only one source and never takes only one form.¹³

What makes a Minnesotan? Historians are often asked about the Minnesotans who fought in the Civil War, but given that the state was not quite three years old when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the answer to this question might be that there were no Minnesotans in the war. Or perhaps they would be the members of Brackett’s Battalion, recruits largely of mixed Native American, French, and Yankee background. Minnesota has long claimed the First Minnesota Regiment as their own, of course, though not one of its members was born in Minnesota and many had barely passed through. So, who were the Minnesotans?

These questions underpin Hampton Smith’s essay, in particular, but versions of them run through all of the essays in the Identity section and call on readers to rethink what makes up a person’s and a place’s identity. Tangi Villerbu pays attention to Minnesota’s identity as French, and he suggests research into how French and Catholics of the pre-territorial and territorial periods organized and understood themselves. David J. Laliberte shows that identity comes from many different places and that people assert and protect it in multiple ways. Who could have predicted that Native American students would use baseball as their safe place? One of the Minnesota masters of identity invention and manipulation was Henry Sibley, fur trader, governor, and Dakota-speaking Indian fighter. Here J. Thomas Murphy introduces Sibley as Hal—a Dakotah and shows how that person reflected nineteenth-century notions of Yankee manhood and nationhood.

This book’s final section, on Method, highlights some of the last decades’ key changes in how historians do their work and invites us to think about how historians and other writers make history. They all raise issues about how to know the truth of a person’s life. In order to democratize the content of what we write, professional historians have turned to new sources and new ways of reading them. These essays demonstrate some of those ways. They also reflect some larger changes in American society and culture of the last generation.

The 1977 television broadcast of the eight-part series Roots, based on Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of a Family (1976), had a tremendous impact not just on African American and other viewers but also on historical societies, as thousands of people began to search for their own roots. This greater interest and demand for personal history as well as an oversupply of PhDs in the subject and the professionalization of public history all encouraged historical societies to expand their hours, their staffs, and even their mission and led to wondrous growth in local, county, state, and private historic sites and societies. Curator Stephen Penick’s essay speaks to the pleasures of work in the public history field. So does Emily F. Ganzel’s. Through one photograph she enters deeply into the lives of a community of people and, in the process, shows how valuable photos are as a historical source. Traci M. Nathans-Kelly finds and mines several rich veins in cookbooks—a source that more and more historians have recently discovered. Bill Wittenbreer also investigates another historians’ source—predictions about the future that actually say more about the present.

The volume concludes with Matt Callahan’s short story. Strictly speaking, it is not an essay about method, but one point of the new history has been lifting restrictions and making less-sharp demarcations in order to see and understand better. So, Callahan introduces us to a Minnesota woman who though not real tells essential truths about her experience and enlightens us about our own, too. Historians would do well to take as much care with our stories and our language as Callahan (and Jenkins and Barrett) do!

Collectively these essays, poems, memoirs, and stories offer a history, albeit incomplete, of the state We’re in, the state of the historical profession, and the state of scholarship and practice. The collection is of course also shaped by the people who could not attend the conference, by the presentations not included here, and by some silences in various fields. Agricultural history, once one of the staples of Minnesota history, has no voice here. The same is true for immigration history—we were surprised by its absence. Businesses including medicine, so crucial in the development of the state and in its personality and economy, also await their new historians. In other words, this is a kind of snapshot photo book of our recent travels in the study of Minnesota history, not an exhaustive account of the long journey. Our camera can never tell the whole story, but it does offer many truths. It also points to the central fact of Minnesota at 150—it is the locale of many experiences and many truths.

Special Note to Students

If you’re reading this for a history class, we encourage you to join the authors in thinking about what makes history history. If you were to write a history of your day, what would you choose to include and what would you leave out (too unimportant, too private, too important?). No version of your day would include everything. You would have to pick and choose; you’d have to construct a story of your day. So, which construction would be balanced, which true? One of the central lessons of the historical work of the last generation is that concepts such as objective and subjective are too simple and, therefore, not very useful in analyzing either documents or accounts of the past. It’s more important, we argue, to presume that all accounts leave out something and to imagine what that might be. Every account is told from a particular point of view, so it’s important to determine that view. Each account is constructed out of more facts than can be included.

As readers of these essays, imagine yourself, too, into the role of the historian doing history—not simply the reader taking it in. As the historian, ask questions, try on different answers, wonder. The skills most important to doing good history are reading carefully, thinking wisely, and imagining expansively.

Special Thanks

Mary Ann Haws, a 1973 graduate of the College of Saint Benedict, comes from a long line of CSB and Saint John’s University families—aunts and uncles were members of both religious communities, relatives galore have attended one or the other. Her husband graduated from SJU and has coached at St. John’s for his career. Their three children all graduated from SJU or CSB. She has held various jobs for the university and been the timekeeper at hundreds of sports matches and swim meets. In other words, she has long been a valuable member of the community. How valuable I did not realize until she agreed to help coordinate the conference and this collection of essays. She became my assistant, my timekeeper, the coordinator of paperwork and calmer of tempers, the mastermind of e-mail traffic, drafts, and corrections. I am most grateful that she also became my friend.

Notes

1. See Minnesota Centennial Commission Records in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society. The artist who wrote and recorded the Minnesota song was Gene Bluestein (with guitar). The outreach representatives for the commission were Arthur Nyhus and William Stohr.

2. William Lass, Professor of History at Mankato State College (as it was called then), published an abbreviated account of the state’s history in 1983, part of the American Association of State and Local History series in honor of the 1976 bicentennial. Lass, limited to two hundred pages, did not wrestle with Native American issues and took up the story when Minnesota became a territory and then a state, reporting the treaties and land cessions briefly and without comment. See William E. Lass, Minnesota, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 2000).

3. http://www.takedownthefort.com.

4. Nick Coleman, As Minnesota Turns 150, How Will It Face Up to Its Original Sin? Star Tribune, Dec. 23, 2007, B1, and First Americans Should Finally Get Apology Long Owed to Them, Star Tribune, May 1, 2008, B1; Lori Sturdevant, A Time when Cultures Met—and Clashed, Star Tribune, Oct. 28, 2007, OP1.

5. Kevin Duchschere, Minnesota Sesquicentennial; State’s Birthday Bash is on Tight Budget, Star Tribune, Jan. 1, 2008, A1. http://survey.sos.state.mn.us/home/index.asp?page=10&recordid=164.

6. Jeffrey Kolnick, Rather Than Perpetrate Injustice, and Nina Archabal, Fort Snelling: Should Its History Be Told, commentaries on the editorial page of the Star Tribune, Feb. 16, 2008, http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/15679667.html (accessed Jan. 10, 2010); Lori Sturdevant, At Age 150, Is Minnesota Ready to Own Up to the Truth About the 1862 Dakota War? Star Tribune, Oct. 27, 2007, http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/11150686.html (accessed Jan. 10, 2010); Kara McGuire, Amid the Festivities of the State’s 150th Birthday, Star Tribune, May 11, 2008, http://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/18848444.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU (accessed Jan. 10, 2010).

7. Nick Coleman, Nothingburger Celebration Will Go Down Easy with State Fair Spice, Star Tribune, Aug. 19, 2008, B1.

8. Exhibit curator Kate Roberts led the staff and public through a rigorous selection process to determine the 150. See http://discovery.mnhs.org/MN150/index.php?title=Main_Page, the project wiki that includes all of the submissions. Decisions about inclusion depended in part on the quality of the nomination.

9. See Annette Atkins, Creating Minnesota: A History from the Inside Out (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007). Two other state histories came out about the same time: Steven Keillor, Shaping Minnesota’s Identity: 150 Years of State History (St. Paul, MN: Pogo Press, 2007), and Karal Ann Marling, Minnesota, Hail to Thee! A Sesquicentennial History (Afton, MN: Afton Historical Society Press, 2007), which WCCO television newsman Don Shelby in his introduction called a wonderful birthday present to Minnesota. Neither grapples with the Native American part of Minnesota’s history.

10. For most essays the editors cut (or asked authors to cut) references to make this book more manageable. Tangi Villerbu’s essay, however, was not cut because his whole point is to bring to our attention underused documents.

11. Judge Diana Murphy’s decision in the Mille Lacs Band’s case about their hunting and fishing rights—nearly a book itself by a judge who had done significant work toward a PhD in history before going to law school—is grounded in her careful reading of the treaty and subsequent cases. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians et al. v. State of MN et al., 861 F. Supp. 784, 841 (D. Minn. 1994).

12. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 175.

13. As a South Dakotan and Missourian, the editors can attest that in neither of our birth states do people spend nearly so much time trying to define their state identity. When Daedalus magazine decided to do a series of state-focused issues, it planned to start with Minnesota and Texas—each with a decidedly strong sense of place. Ultimately, only the Minnesota volume appeared. See, Minnesota: A Different America? Daedalus (Summer 2002), reprinted as Minnesota: Real and Imagined (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2004).

JAMES H. MADISON

State History in Regional Perspective

Let me begin with two popular notions about states and regions. One is that midwestern state and regional history has declined to a thin and inconsequential field that does not deserve a central place in our historical thinking or teaching. The second notion, widely held in the twenty-first century, is that globalization has melted states and regions into insignificance. Like disappearing ice cubes on a summer sidewalk, states and regions no longer have distinct identities. Migrations, churnings of peoples, homogeneity of popular culture, standardization, Wal-Marts, McDonald’s—these and other changes have made us all global and, therefore, placeless. Evidence exists to support both of these notions, but neither is accurate.

In thinking about states and regions, I recently did what my students do: I went to Google, that great answerer of all questions, and typed in state history and several variations. My favorite site to pop up was TheUS50.com. I was tempted to think that Google had done my research. I started with Indiana, my home state, and found this sentence: Indiana is one of the great states that make up the United States of America. Yes, right! Then I thought, well, I ought to check the Minnesota entry and found this: Minnesota is one of the great states that make up the United States of America. Oops. Here is an example, of course, of the kind of mediocrity and silliness that is out there when it comes to state and regional history. Some of it seeps into our grade-school classrooms and onto our local news broadcasts and even into our museums and historic sites. We can do better. We have to do better if the field of state and regional history is to have a future.

My fundamental text is not TheUS50.com but The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, published in 2007 by Indiana University Press. Let me give you a few glimpses of what the nearly two thousand pages of The Midwest Encyclopedia offer by quoting a first or last sentence from several of the twelve state essays. The last sentence from the Illinois essay: But then I’m a native Illinoisan, and we are prone to our illusions. The last sentence from Indiana: Makes you religious, takes your breath away. First sentence, Iowa: "When I was young I thought Iowa went on