Regional Renewal

Michael C. Steiner is professor emeritus of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton where he taught for forty years, from 1975 until 2015. During his years at Fullerton, Steiner served as department chair and twice as a Distinguished Fulbright Chair: in Hungary in 1998-1999, and in Poland in 2004. He is the author of more than thirty peer-reviewed articles, among them the prize-winning essays "The Significance of Turner's Sectional Thesis" and "Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney's Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West." Steiner is also the author or editor of five books, most recently: with Wayne Franklin, Mapping American Culture; with David Wrobel, Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity; Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West; and Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism. A native Midwesterner, Steiner currently lives in Easton, Pennsylvania and focuses his creative energy on writing and lecturing about American regionalism and the Midwest.

Acknowledgments Prologue: The Midwest as Seedbed of Diversity and Source of Ideas Part One: An Emerging Region and a Variety of Voices 1. Section, Region, Nation, World 2. Native, White, and Black Heartlands: The Midwest as a Wellspring of Diversity 3. Varieties of Regional Thought and the Midwest as Seedbed of an Idea Part Two: Four Founders of Regional Theory 4. John Wesley Powell and the Physical Foundation of Regionalism 5. Jane Addams, the Urban Frontier, and the Cosmopolitan Neighborhood 6. Frederick Jackson Turner and the Significance of Sections 7. Hamlin Garland, the Middle Border, and the Rise and Fall of a Radical Regionalist Part Three: Race and Regionalism 8. The Rise of the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Expansion of American Regionalism, 1927-1945 9. The Persistence of Midwestern Regionalism, 1940s and Beyond Epilogue: Regionalism Is a Forever Agenda Notes Index