Lauck: Science Professor and Redneck Farmers

lauck: When the twentieth century dawned, the American Midwest stood tall as the republic's ascendant and triumphant region economically prosperous, politically formidable, culturally proud, and consciously regional, Lauck writes in From Warm Center to Ragged Edge the Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965, according to The Chronicle Herald. Yet just a few decades later, in an era of growing globalism, vocal intellectuals recast the Midwest as a repressive and sterile backwater filled with small-town snoops, redneck farmers, and zealous theocrats, wrote Lauck, a history and political science professor at the University of South Dakota. Yet the book's exploration of decades-old historical trends helps explain the attraction Trump held in the election for people who felt alienated by the political and cultural mainstream. The book takes its title from an observation by Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Intellectuals' increasing hostility toward the Midwest also discouraged some writers from telling the region's stories, including accounts of everyday life in the Midwest, Lauck wrote. The region's isolationist tendencies after World War II were out of sync with the rest of the U.S., Lauck said, and these tendencies clashed with the country's growing cosmopolitanism and desire to be part of the larger world. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.