1. GINETTE ALEY is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies at Iowa State University, and she is an instructor at Virginia Tech. She wishes to thank Pamela Riney-Kehrberg and Dorothy Schwieder for their suggestions and encouragement.
2. 1 Bess Streeter Aldrich, The Rim of the Prairie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), xi. In their introduction, Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray, The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 2, referred to the first few decades of the twentieth century as a period in which the dominant popular image of the Midwest was of a place characterized by "stifling, bourgeois, small-town conformity." James H. Madison considers the possibility that some of the negative assertions about the region are valid and linger on, such as those that speak of the Midwest as "provincial and unsophisticated, pragmatic and materialistic, bland and boring [with] many generalizations to be made about midwestern lag, retardation, or decline," in "The States of the Midwest: An Introduction," in James H. Madison, ed., Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 4.
3. 2 Cayton and Gray, The American Midwest, 1, suggest that a deficiency of regional scholarly interpretation may stem from the Midwest's lack of "the kind of geographic coherence, historical issues, and cultural touchstones that have informed regional identity" in other areas of the United States. In a recent review of this volume the reviewer criticized the region's lack of scholarly attention, describing the Midwest as the "Rodney Dangerfield of American regions; it doesn't get much respect." See
4. Kent Blaser, Nebraska History 83 (Spring 2002): 52.
5. A work that considers regional identities but overlooks the Midwest is Edward L. Ayers et al., All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Glenda Riley employs the terms "dowdy" and "dreary" in remarking on Midwest stereotypes in the foreword to Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Wendy Hamand Venet, eds., Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), ix-xi; Venet and Murphy, "Introduction: The Strange Career of Madame Dubuque and Midwestern Women's History," in Midwestern Women, 2.