The Yankee West

Community Life on the Michigan Frontier

Bibliographic Data

ID11675920
AuthorsCharles E Brooks (corresponding author), Susan E Gray (Wichita State University)
Year1997
Volume17
Issue3
Pages539-539
Publication date1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Early Republic (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-1275 • E-ISSN: 1553-0620
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3123963
OpenAlexW1977434040
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Susan Gray explores community formation among New England migrants to the Upper Midwest in the generation before the Civil War. Focusing on Kalamazoo County in southwestern Michigan, she examines how 'Yankees' moving west reconstructed familiar communal institutions on the frontier while confronting forces of profound socioeconomic change, particularly the rise of the market economy and the commercialization of agriculture. Gray argues that Yankee culture was a type of ethnic identity that was transplanted to the Midwest and reshaped there into a new regional identity. In chapters on settlement patterns, economic exchange, the family, religion, and politics, Gray traces the culture that the migrants established through their institutions as a defense against the uncertainty of the frontier. She demonstrates that although settlers sought rapid economic development, they remained wary of the threat that the resulting spirit of competition posed to their communal ideals. As isolated settlements developed into flourishing communities linked to eastern markets, however, Yankee culture was transformed. What was once a communal culture became a class culture, appropriated by a newly formed rural bourgeoisie to explain their success as the triumphant emergence of the Midwest and to identify their region as true America. |Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation

Archaeology · Economic history · Frontier · Political science · Sociology · Yankee · American History and Culture · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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