Books that might be considered staples of the Midwest today were actually bundled into the revolt from the village, seen as mocking the region.

For Kenn Thomas, the Midwest periphery was a perfect vantage point for keeping track of D.C., Roswell, Langley, and the rest.

I say “region” and not “the South” because the regional borders are porous, not just in those liminal zones that separate the South from Appalachia and Appalachia from the Midwest, but in our national self-conception as well.

How we speak is the product of historical events, movements, power, and geography. Cleveland’s proximity to steel mills and auto plants drew European immigrants; the Great Depression made the Transatlantic “wough” and “greatah” fall out of favor.

When I close my eyes and think of my hometown, the elements that come to mind are not that much different from what my great-grandfather encountered when he arrived in Cleveland from his Ukrainian village of Staryava almost a century ago, in 1929.

Lauck isn’t saying that everything was good back then, or making a “this was the Real America” claim. He is trying to show that the Midwest was, for all its flaws, a place where the idea of true democracy began to flourish.

Sandusky carried a raw and pallid three-season grayness of any small-sized Midwestern industrial town, but I knew we still carried the title Color Capital of the World. The hard part was that no one in the present world remembered the distinction.

LaPorte is not so close to Chicago as to be totally enmeshed in the Northwest Indiana urban grit, yet is not quite all the way to the rural corn fields that spread between cities like Detroit and Toledo. LaPorte, French for “The Door,” is a geopolitical focal point pinpointing the overlap of social and economic change.

Donald Trump, who won Ohio handily in both 2016 and 2020, tapped into a primal element of the American spirit.