On Jon Lauck’s “The Good Country”

Jon Lauck has achieved something extraordinary with his latest book, A Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900. Indeed, as one presenter at the recent Midwest History Association meeting in Grand Rapids rightly noted, Lauck has become, for all intents and purposes, our new Frederick Jackson Turner. A Good Country radically reinterprets history in a most conservative fashion, forcing us to take his argument in all future arguments about the Midwest and about America’s nineteenth century.