The following works deal with the cultural, political, economic, military, biographical and geologic history of the Midwestern United States.
Overviews
Cayton, Andrew R. L. Midwest and the Nation (1990)
Cayton, Andrew R. L. and Susan E. Gray, eds. The Identity of the American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. (2001)
Cayton, Andrew R. L. and Peter S. Onuf, eds. The American Midwest: Rethinking the History of an American Nation (1990)
Good, David F. "American History through a Midwestern Lens." Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 38.2 (2012): 435+ online; emphasis on economic history
Hurt, R. Douglas. The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century (University of Arizona Press; 2011) 315 pages; the environmental, social, economic, and political history of the region.
Lauck, Jon K. "Why the Midwest Matters." The Midwest Quarterly 54.2 (2013): 165+
Nordin, Dennis S., and Roy V. Scott. From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur: The Transformation of Midwestern Agriculture. (2005) 356pp.
Sisson, Richard, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, eds. The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Indiana University Press, 2006), 1916 pp of articles by scholars on all topics covering the 12 states
Walker, Kenneth R. A History of the Middle West From the Beginning to 1970 (1972) 552pp the only textbook
Wertenbaker, Thomas J. "The Molding of the Middle West." American Historical Review (1948): 223-234. in JSTOR
Billington, Ray Allen. "From Association to Organization: The OAH in the Bad Old Days." Journal of American History (1978): 75-84. in JSTOR
Brown, David S. Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing (2009)
Buck, Solon J. "The Progress and Possibilities of Mississippi Valley History," Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1923) 10#1 pp. 5–20 in JSTOR
Clark, Thomas D. "Our Roots Flourished in the Valley." Journal of American History (1978): 85-107. in JSTOR
Howard, Joseph Kinsey. "New Concepts of Plains History." Montana Magazine of History (1952): 16-23. in JSTOR
Kirkendall, Richard S., ed. The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Lauck, Jon K. "The Prairie Historians and the Foundations of Midwestern History." Annals of Iowa (2012) 71#2 pp: 137-173.
Lauck, Jon K. The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (University of Iowa Press; 2013) 166 pages; criticizes the neglect of the Midwest in contemporary historiography and argues for a revival of attention excerpt
Madison, James H., ed. Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States (Indiana UP, 1988)
Ross, Earle D. "A Generation of Prairie Historiography." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 33#3 (1946) pp: 391-410. in JSTOR
Tyrrell, Ian. "Public at the Creation: Place, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907-1950," Journal of American History (2007) 94#1 pp. 19–46 in JSTOR
Before 1783
Fisher, James. "A Forgotten Hero Remembered, Revered, and Revised: The Legacy and Ordeal of George Rogers Clark." Indiana Magazine of History (1996): 109-132. online
Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (2009)
White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 (1991)
Frontier Era: 1783-1850
Barnhart, John D. Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the Plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775-1818 (1953)
Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (5th ed. 2001); 892 pp; textbook with 160pp of detailed annotated bibliographies
Buley, R. Carlyle. The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period 1815–1840 2 vol (1951), Pulitzer Prize
Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (2006)
Lamar, Howard, ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West (1998); this is a revised version of Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West ed. by Howard Lamar (1977)
Larson, John Lauritz. "Teaching the West in the Early American Republic: Old Chestnuts and the Fruits of New Research." Magazine of History (2000): 17-20. in JSTOR, historiography
Rodriguez, Junius P. ed. The Louisiana Purchase: A Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia (2002)
Scheiber, Harry N. ed. The Old Northwest; studies in regional history, 1787-1910 (1969) 16 essays by scholars on economic and social topics
Smelser, Marshall. "Tecumseh, Harrison, and the War of 1812," Indiana Magazine of History (March 1969) 65#1 pp 25-44 online
Watts, Edward, and David Rachels, eds. The First West: Writing from the American Frontier, 1776-1860 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 960pp; primary sources excerpt and text search
Wyman, Mark. The Wisconsin Frontier (2009)
Civil War & Gilded Age
Barker, Brett, et al. eds. Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War (2013).
Gjerde, John. Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (1999) excerpt and text search
Jensen, Richard J. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–96 (University of Chicago Press, 1971) online
Jordan, Philip D.Ohio Comes of Age: 1873-1900 Volume 5 (1968) online
Kleppner, Paul. The cross of culture : a social analysis of midwestern politics, 1850-1900 (1970) online
Nye, Russel B. Midwestern Progressive Politics (1959)
Scheiber, Harry N. ed. The Old Northwest; studies in regional history, 1787-1910 (1969) 16 essays by scholars on economic and social topics
Thornbrough, Emma Lou. Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850-1880 (1965); the standard scholarly history
1900 to 1940
Billington, Ray Allen. "The Origins of Middle Western Isolationism," Political Science Quarterly (1945) 60#1, 45-64. in JSTOR
Bonnifield, Paul. The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression, (University of New Mexico Press, 1978)
Rees, Amanda. The Great Plains Region: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (2004); architecture, art, fashion, folklore, food, language, literature, music, religion, and sports
Shortridge, James R. The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (1989) excerpt and text search
Slade, Joseph W. and Judith Lee. The Midwest: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (2004); architecture, art, fashion, folklore, food, language, literature, music, religion, and sports
Atack, Jeremy and Fred Bateman. To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North (Iowa State University Press, 1987)* Grant, Michael Johnston. Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945, (University of Nebraska Press, (2002)
Hart, John Fraser. "Change in the corn belt." Geographical Review (1986) pp: 51-72. online
Jones, Robert Leslie. History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (1983)
Jones, Robert Leslie. "The Horse and Mule Industry in Ohio to 1865." Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1946): 61-88. in JSTOR
Page, Brian and Richard Walker. "From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-Industrial Revolution in the American Midwest," Economic Geography (1991) 67#4, 281-315.
Shannon, Fred A. "The Status of the Midwestern Farmer in 1900" Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1950) 27#3 pp: 491–510. in JSTOR
Industry
High, Stephen C. Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984 (2003)
Longworth, Richard C. Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism (2008)
Meyer, David R. "Midwestern Industrialization and the American Manufacturing Belt in the Nineteenth Century", The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 49, No. 4 (December, 1989) pp. 921–937.in JSTOR
Page, Brian and Richard Walker. "From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-Industrial Revolution in the American Midwest," Economic Geography (1991) 67#4, 281-315.
Labor
Boryczka, Raymond, and Lorin Lee Cary. No Strength Without Union: An Illustrated History of Ohio Workers, 1803-1980 Ohio Historical Society, 1982.
Critchlow, Donald (ed.). Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900-1925. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.
Feurer, Rosemary. Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Higbie, Frank Tobias. Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930. (2003).
Margo, Robert A. "Regional Wage Gaps and the Settlement of the Midwest." Explorations in Economic History (1999) 36#2 pp: 128-143.
Nelson, Daniel. Farm and Factory: Workers in the Midwest 1880-1990. (1995) online review
Neth, Mary. "Gender and the Family Labor System: Defining Work in the Rural Midwest." Journal of Social History (1994): 563-577. in JSTOR
Schob, David E. Hired Hands and Plowboys: Farm labor in the Midwest, 1815-60. (1975).
Warren, Wilson J. Struggling with Iowa's Pride: Labor Relations, Unionism, and Politics in the Rural Midwest Since 1877. (2000)
Railroads and transportation
Atack, Jeremy, et al. "Did railroads induce or follow economic growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest, 1850–1860." Social Science History 34.2 (2010): 171-197. online
Campbell, Ballard. "The Good Roads Movement in Wisconsin, 1890-1911," Wisconsin Magazine of History 49 (1966): 273-93
Larson, John Lauritz. Bonds of enterprise: John Murray Forbes and western development in America's railway age (2010).
Mercer, Lloyd J. "Land Grants to American Railroads: Social Cost or Social Benefit?" Business History Review (1969) 43#2 pp 134-151 in JSTOR
Meyer, Balthasar Henry, and Caroline Elizabeth MacGill. History of Transportation in the United States before 1860 (1917). online
White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)
Geography, land and environment
Blouet, Brian W. and Frederick C. Luebke, eds. The Great Plains: Environment and Culture (U of Nebraska Press, 1979)[ISBN missing]
Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992), 1850–1900 excerpt and text search
Garland, John H. The North American Midwest: A Regional Geography (1955)[ISBN missing]
Hart, John Fraser. "The Middle West." Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1972) 62#2 pp: 258-282. in JSTOR
Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837 (1968)
Van Atta, John R. Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785--1850 (2014)
Politics
Buck, Solon J. The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and Its Political, Economic and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (1913) online
Fenton, James H. Midwest politics (1966), voting patterns by state
Jensen, Richard J. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–96 (University of Chicago Press, 1971) online
Lauck, Jon K. "Trump and The Midwest: The 2016 Presidential Election and The Avenues of Midwestern Historiography" Studies in Midwestern History (2017) vol 3#1 online
Lauck, Jon K. and Catherine McNicol Stock, eds. The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (UP of Kansas, 2020) online review
Pearce, Neal R. The Great Plains States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Nine Great Plains States (1973); in-depth coverage of politics and economy
Pearce, Neal R. The Great Lakes States of America: People, politics, and power in the Five Great Lakes States (1980); in-depth coverage of politics and economy
Social history
Education
Fuller, Wayne. The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (U of Chicago Press, 1982).
Mattingly, Paul H. and Edward W. Stevens Jr. Schools and the Means of Education Shall Forever Be Encouraged: A History of Education in the Old Northwest, 1787-1880 (1987), 132pp
Theobald, Paul. Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1995)[ISBN missing]
Wheeler, Kenneth H. Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest (2011)
Race
Lehman, Christopher P. Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787-1865 (2011)
Thornbrough, Emma Lou. Negro in Indiana before 1900 : a study of a minority 1993
Thornbrough, Emma Lou. Indiana Blacks in the twentieth century (2001) online
Religion
Barlow, Philip, and Mark Silk, eds. Religion and public life in the Midwest: America's common denominator? (2004)
Bodensieck, Julius, ed. The encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church (3 vol 1965) vol 1 and 3 online free
Brauer, James Leonard and Fred L. Precht, eds. Lutheran Worship: History and Practice (1993)
Gjerde, Jon. The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural evolution in the rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (1999)[ISBN missing]
Granquist, Mark. Lutherans in America: A New History (2015)
Madison, James H. "Reformers and the Rural Church, 1900-1950," Journal of American History 73 (1986): 645-68.
Meyer, Carl S. Moving Frontiers: Readings in the History of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (1986)
Sweet, W.W. ed. Religion on the American Frontier (4 vol 1931-46), primary sources; lengthy volumes on Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians
Rural
Barron, Hal S. Mixed Harvest: the Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (1997).[ISBN missing]
Douglas, Lake. "'To Improve the Soil and the Mind': Content and Context of Nineteenth-Century Agricultural Literature." Landscape Journal 25.1 (2006): 67-79.
Fry, John. “Good Farming – Clear Thinking – Right Living”: Midwestern Farm Newspapers, Social Reform, and Rural Readers in the Early Twentieth Century.” Agricultural History 78#1 (2004): 34-49.
Motz, Marilyn Ferris. "Folk Expression of Time and Place: 19th-Century Midwestern Rural Diaries." Journal of American Folklore 100#396 (1987): 131-147. online
Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1945 (1995).
Reynolds, David R. There goes the neighborhood: Rural school consolidation at the grass roots in early twentieth-century Iowa (U of Iowa Press, 2002).
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela. Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (2005).
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela. “Farm Youth and Progressive Agricultural Reform: Dexter D. Mayne and the Farm Boy Cavaliers of America.” Agricultural History 85#4 (2011) 437-459.
Weber, Margaret. "Making the best better: 4-H and rural anxiety in the early twentieth century." (MA thesis Iowa State University, 2013) online.
Settlement and ethnicity
Aponte, Robert, and Marcelo Siles Cabrera. "Latinos in the heartland: The browning of the Midwest" (Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, 1994) online
Gjerde, Jon. The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural evolution in the rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (1999)[ISBN missing]
Hudson, John C. "North American Origins of Middlewestern Frontier Populations," Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1988) 78#3 pp: 395-413. in JSTOR
Mathews, Lois Kimbell. The Expansion of New England: The Spread of New England Settlement and Institutions to the Mississippi River, 1620- 1865 (1909) online
Power, Richard Lyle. Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest (1953).
Urban
Bodenhamer, David, ed. The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (1994)
Muller, Edward K. "Selective urban growth in the Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860." Geographical Review (1976): 178-199. online; also in JSTOR
Reiff, Janice L., Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman, eds. The Encyclopedia of Chicago (2005) complete online version
Teaford, Jon C. Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (1993)
Van Tassell, David, and John J Grabowski, eds. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (2nd ed. 1996)
Women
Aley, Ginette. "'Knotted Together Like Roots in the Darkness': Rural Midwestern Women and Region-A Bibliographic Guide." Agricultural history (2003) 77#3 pp: 453-481. in JSTOR
Aley, Ginette. "A Republic of Farm People: Women, Families, and Market-Minded Agrarianism in Ohio, 1820s–1830s." Ohio History (2007) 114#1 pp: 28-45. online
Gabin, Nancy. "Fallow Yet Fertile: The Field of Indiana Women's History." Indiana Magazine of History (2000) online
Jensen, Joan M. Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850-1925 (Minnesota Historical Press: 2006).
Johnson, Yvonne, ed. Feminist Frontiers: Women who Shaped the Midwest (Truman State Univ Press, 2010) excerpt and text search
Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld, and Wendy Hamand Venet, eds. Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads (1997),
Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1945 (1995).
Riley, Glenda. The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (1988)
Schlissel, Lillian. Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (2004) excerpt
Stuhler, Barbara, and Gretchen V. Kreuter, eds. Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 16 essays by experts covering numerous women
Primary sources
Frederick, John T., ed. Out of the Midwest: A Collection of Present-Day Writing (1944) 428pp[ISBN missing]
Watts, Edward, and David Rachels, eds. The First West: Writing from the American Frontier, 1776-1860 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 960pp; primary sources excerpt and text search, long excerpts from 59 authors, chiefly Midwesterners