The Books That Shaped My View Of The Midwest

Dualism defines Midwestern cities. They've long been the home of good and bad things, at the same time.

Image of the Great Basin at The World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Source: gettyimages.com

I’ve described myself here many times as a “creature of the Midwest.” I’ve certainly visited other places, but I’ve had a home exclusively in the nation’s midsection. I’ve mostly attributed my views on urban life in the Midwest through my experiences in Detroit, central Indiana and Chicago.

But I’ve also read quite a bit on the Midwest, and what I’ve read has influenced me greatly as well. As I get older, I’m finding that things that I once thought were urban challenges might really be Midwestern challenges. We’ve witnessed three decades of revitalization in America’s coastal cities now, and while they’re far from perfect, issues like completely unaffordable housing are indicators of problems related to success, not decline. Meanwhile, economic stratification and inequality, segregation and the concentration of poverty, or a general failure to economically rebound have defined cities in the nation’s heartland. While there have been strong successes, Midwestern cities haven’t kept pace with those on the coasts, or those in the South and Southwest.

I want to find the key that unlocks the revitalization of Midwestern cities.

I’ve read quite a bit on what’s happened in the Midwest, so I can understand what could lie ahead for its future. Here’s a top ten of books I’d recommend to expand your understanding of Midwestern cities. Instead of a 1 > 10 or 10 > 1 listing format, I’m listing them by publication date, oldest to newest.

Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; Arnold Hirsch (1983)

This book examines how, during the post-World War II era in Chicago, public policies and white resistance to integration created and expanded a segregated Black neighborhood, often referred to as the "second ghetto," by utilizing strategies like restrictive housing covenants, urban renewal projects, and violent intimidation, effectively solidifying racial segregation despite the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

I came across this book in grad school, in a neighborhood planning class. This was influential in bringing me to the belief that Northern cities like Chicago created and perfected a new kind of segregation that was completely different from that of the Jim Crow South – it was a policy of Black containment. Neighborhood fears were distilled into public policy, and when suburbia opened up during the same period, it became much easier to neglect the needs of the city.

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West; William Cronon (1991)

Cronon’s well-researched book is a fantastic historical analysis of how Chicago and the American West became economically and ecologically dependent on each other. Chicago became the funnel for the products grown or manufactured between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains – corn, soybeans, grain, timber, copper, iron ore, steel, oil, autos, appliances, and more. The rail network that supported this growth is still here, and integral to Chicago’s position as a transportation hub. St. Louis may have been the city that opened up the American West for exploration, but Chicago opened it up for commerce.

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes, 1650-1815; Richard White (1991)

When I first read this book I remember thinking, perhaps this is where the roots of Midwestern culture resides, and this shows how close the Midwest came to being something entirely different than a part of continental America. White’s book explores the relationships between Indigenous people, French and British fur traders, and American settlers. For more than 150 years, the Midwest was contested territory. Each group was often accommodating, seeking to live in peace, but also seeking to establish their own stamp on the region. There were many points in the region’s history where it could’ve been reasonable to assume that an Indigenous nation, or an Indigenous/French/British extension of Quebec and Ontario beyond the Great Lakes, could’ve happened.

Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit; Thomas Sugrue (1996)

In many respects, Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis is the Detroit version of Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto on Chicago. Detroit’s racial segregation resulting from discriminatory housing practices came from the same fears that pushed whites in Chicago. But as a one-industry town, Detroit was exposed to more economic shocks than Chicago was, and segregation and inequality struck it more deeply.

In fact, Sugrue’s premise that systemic racism and economic shifts in the auto industry impacted Detroit a good half-century prior to the city’s 1967 riots led to a counterintuitive thought. Chicago may have been spared a similar fate because of its Machine-style political system, which emphasized patronage, spoils and hyper-local representation through its 50 city wards. Detroit, however, in 1918 became the largest U.S. city with city-wide elected council members as well as mayor. Detroit did not have city council districts again until 2014, when it created seven representative districts serving the city.

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Chicago; Eric Klinenberg (2002)

Chicago has a reputation for being a cold city. However, a week-long heat wave in July 1995 saw daytime temps as high as 106 degrees, and the suffocating humidity made it feel as hot as 125. Overnight temps stayed above 90. And in a city where air conditioning can be considered optional, many people had none. That week more than 700 people died because of the heat.

The heat wave exposed inequality and social isolation in Chicago. Klinenberg’s research details the impact of the heat wave on the city’s poorer neighborhoods and elderly residents. Klinenberg found that the city’s urban heat island effect made the poor and elderly especially vulnerable, and the city’s inability to respond quickly made matters worse. Chicago learned from the experience and has since established designated cooling centers (and warming centers for cold weather events) in city facilities. Sadly, this was also a lesson learned by many cities during the Covid pandemic.

Devil in the White City; Erik Larson (2003)

Ever since I first read Devil in the White City it’s probably the single book that comes to my mind as one that should be made into a film. In this historical nonfiction work, two stories are explored – the work of Daniel Burnham on the 1893 World’s Fair, often seen as Chicago’s introduction to the world stage in the 19^th century; and the murderous journey, at the same time, of H.H. Holmes, often recognized as America’s first serial killer.

Again, I’d love to see this as a film.

Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism; Richard Longworth (2009)

Well before JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy book sought to describe the life and struggles of people living in Appalachian Ohio, Richard Longworth wrote Caught in the Middle. A native of Iowa who later moved to Chicago, Longworth surveys the entire Midwest, and the impact of the economic and social changes it absorbed in the 40 years prior to the book’s publication in 2009. The growth of agri-industry that led to the demise of family farms; the loss of well-paying, low-skill labor jobs in manufacturing, affecting cities big and small; a global economy that was routing itself around the region; and the growing resentment of the region’s residents.

I should read it again. It might speak more to how we can exit today’s political crisis more than anything else.

Detroit: An American Autopsy; Charlie LeDuff (2013)

The Motor City’s come a long way in the last 12 years, and I’ve written about it as much as anyone. But Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy could be the book that describes Detroit at its most dystopic. Published just as Detroit was entering the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, LeDuff walks the streets of the city seeking answers for how a place that was once the nation’s wealthiest city could become the nation’s poorest within a lifetime. He’s also looking for answers to his family’s secrets as well. Along the way he “beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination,” as Amazon notes.

In a sense this fits into the same genre as the 2002 film 8 Mile, which has Eminem trying to find meaning in a collapsing world. All of this was taking place when fascination with Detroit’s poverty and ruins were at its peak. I wasn’t a fan of that period for Detroit, but you can’t celebrate the good without remembering the bad.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America; Richard Rothstein (2017)

Last week I wrote about The Color of Law in this space and generated some pushback from readers. Maybe I’ll take some crap from people by sounding as if I deemphasize the relative importance of redlining in today’s segregated society, but I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this book elevated redlining in the public discourse and caused people to look at other practices that contributed to the state of American cities today. There’s a thru-line from the HOLC maps produced in the 1930’s and the mortgage lending practices that banks put in place over the next 90 years.

The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America; Alan Mallach (2018)

Alan Mallach, who I also mentioned last week, shows up here because of his excellent book The Divided City. It’s not specifically about Midwestern cities, but it is specifically about the future of legacy industrial cities, an interest he and I share. Urban revitalization has come to many legacy industrial cities, but there are breadth and depth concerns when comparing them to coastal cities. Legacy industrial cities haven’t seen the breadth of transformation as coastal cities, and their entrenched legacies of segregation are preventing revitalization from reaching deeper. Mallach writes about what can be done to foster this transformation, with special attention given to the smaller cities caught in the same bind (think Flint, MI, Gary, IN, Youngstown, OH). These are cities that never really developed the foundation for a knowledge economy to flourish.

There are three other books I believe deserve special mention. They don’t speak to the conditions of Midwestern cities but speak to the emergence and development of Midwestern culture.

I’ve long believed that the Midwest gets short shrift for having its distinct culture. We recognize the subcultures of other regions – New England, East Coast, Appalachian, Southeast, the Mountain West, the Pacific Coast. Texas is a region of its own. I think that saying the Midwest is an amalgam of New England, Appalachian and Southern influences misses the mark. These books helped me see that.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America; David Hackett Fischer (1989)

There were 169 years between the establishment of Jamestown as the first English permanent settlement in America in 1607, and the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776. During that period there was significant discovery and settlement by British people, who brought their culture with them. Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed shows how people from different parts of the British Isles settled specific parts of the emerging America American subcultures.

At 900-plus pages, it’s a very long read that resists summation here. But I highly recommend it.

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America; Colin Woodard (2011)

If Albion’s Seed helps us understand how American subcultures formed, American Nations helps us understand how they spread, mutated and interacted with one another. Colin Woodard does an excellent job of detailing how American culture has always been in competition with itself, ultimately leading to eleven regional cultures that alternate positions of power over a disunited nation. Another book that resists easy summation that is also highly recommended.

How to Speak Midwestern; Edward McClelland (2016)

This cool book by Edward McClelland covers Inland Northern American English dialect spoken primarily by whites in the Great Lakes region (look, as a Black man writing this, it’s not a racist statement, but one of fact. Who has heard of any nonwhite people in the region that speak like this? Besides, a case can be made that Midwestern segregation has limited regional accent dispersion to other groups in the region, especially Blacks.)

Anyway, I look at the accent as yet another way to distinguish the uniqueness of the region.