Drawing on personal experiences as well as a wide variety of scholarship, the authors consider what it means to be from the Midwest and why Midwesterners have traditionally been less assertive about their regional identity than other Americans.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Andrew L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray, "The Story of the Midwest: An Introduction"
Mary Neth, "Seeing the Midwest with Peripheral Vision: Identities, Narratives, and Region"
Eric Hinderaker, "Liberating Contrivances: Narrative and Identity in Ohio Valley Histories"
John Lauritz Larson, "Pigs in Space, or What Shapes American Regional Cultures?"
Nicole Etcheson, "Barbecued Kentuckians and Six-Foot Texas Rangers: The Construction of Midwestern Identity"
Kathleen N. Conzen, "Piing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwestern Regionality"
Kenneth Winkle, "'The Great Body of the Republic': Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of a Middle West"
Susan E. Gray, "Stories Written in the Blood: Race, Identity, and the Middle West"
Andrew R. L. Cayton, "The Anti-region: Place and identity in the History of the American Middle West"
R. Douglas Hurt, "Midwestern Distinctiveness"
Jon Gjerde, "Middleness and the Middle West"

edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton, Susan E. Gray