Eric Michael Rhodes ’16 has announced that his chapter, “Midwestern ‘Mobocracy’: The Emergence of Labor Politics and Racial Exclusion in Cincinnati, 1829–1836” will be included in, The Making of the Midwest Essays on the Formation of Midwestern Identity, 1787–1900. The book, edited by Jon K. Lauck, will be released by Hastings College Press in May.

Description: Everything has a beginning, including the Midwest. During the American colonial period, what would become the Midwest was the “backcountry,” or the area behind the coastal population centers. It was rural and rough, the sort of place that fueled populist resistance to the federal taxation of whiskey. At the time of the Revolution, it was The West, often undifferentiated between north and south and largely associated with Kentucky. In the early years of the republic, however, the regional differentiation deepened and grew until the latter half of the 19th-century, when the Midwest emerged as a fully formed region. The essays in this book help explain this process of region-making.