The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest

by Jon K. Lauck (Editor), Catherine McNicol Stock (Editor)(Contributor), Mike Chamberlain (Narrator)

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats' so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. A deep look at the Midwest's history of conservative politics, this timely volume reveals how conservative victories in state houses, legislatures, and national elections in the early twenty-first century, far from coming out of nowhere, in fact had extensive roots across decades of political organization in the region.

Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of midwestern conservatism after World War II--a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region's complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest's political complexity--and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.



RUNNING TIME ⇒ 13hrs. and 38mins.

©2020 The University Press of Kansas (P)2020 Tantor

Genres: History, Political Science

Audible Audio

First published April 17, 2020

Reviews

[Michael Enright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, mostly because it provides a more or less unconventional take on the politics of a region that includes the State in which I was born and raised, Michigan. The chapters on Michigan's political history were enjoyable as provides a better appreciation for people and events that I knew of, but didn't quite understand(one detailed the pro-abortion Republican women of Michigan in the 1970s, another detailed the Upper Peninsula's movement to leave Michigan and form the state of Superior, a third chapter based on urban issues had a significant discussion on Coleman Young). Other chapters, while harder to follow, filled in the larger story of the region as a more or less battleground area with no real predominant fixed political orientation.

I read this book on an audio format. Some of the chapters were very statistic laden and hard to follow.

[Kevin]

Reading for some perspective and insights. Solid scholarship and research; interesting, and worth the time. Essays on UP Michigan and Ralph Engelstad Arena were particularly interesting to me.
Unsurprisingly, this collection of essays is a well-researched reminder that a region, politics, and history are far more complicated than news soundbites and social media would have us believe.

[Russell Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like its companion volume, The Liberal Heartland, this collection has some very good essays, but the whole was less than its parts. Very much a grab-bag collection, rather than a systematic examination of the topic.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

No or less than 5 references to Missouri.

[PottWab Regional Library]

A