Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest

by Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno University of California Press 06/21/2022, paperback SKU: 9780520387614   An overdue examination of the Midwest's long influence on nationalism and white supremacy Though many associate racism with the regional legacy of the South, it is the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From Jefferson's noble farmer to The Wizard of Oz, imagining the Midwest has quietly gone hand-in-hand with imagining whiteness as desirable and virtuous. Since at least the U.S. Civil War, the imagined Midwest has served as a screen or canvas, projecting and absorbing tropes and values of virtuous whiteness and its opposite, white deplorability, with national and global significance. Imagining the Heartland provides a poignant and timely answer to how and why the Midwest has played this role in the American imagination. In Imagining the Heartland, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Josh Reno argue that