Where East Meets (Mid)West

Exploring an American Regional Divide

Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781606354964
• eBook ISBN: 9781631015755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Essays on midwestern regional identity

Somewhere west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River, the Midwest begins. Just where exactly, and how, and why are the questions explored in Where East Meets (Mid)West. Bringing together a range of perspectives, the volume argues that while cultural boundaries remain difficult to define, Ohio has been central to regional transitions throughout history. To Native Americans, Ohio was the meeting place of two major drainage basins: the Ohio River and the Great Lakes Basin, which resulted in large amounts of trade activity, cultural exchange, and conflict. During America's westward expansion, Ohio was an essential pathway, the first of the new Northwest territories to gain statehood, and a battleground over the issue of enslavement.

More recently, Ohio's diverse makeup––a combination of rural agriculture, new industry, urbanism, and the Rust Belt––has made it challenging to categorize. Is it part of the Midwest? Does the Midwest even begin in Ohio, or does the transition start in western New York or along the western edge of Pennsylvania? The contributors to Where East Meets (Mid)West wrestle with these questions of cultural and regional identity, exploring from various angles what it means to be midwestern.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface: Errand onto the Appalachian Plateau: Finding the Midwest’s Eastern Borderlands
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Before There Was a West: Appalachian Frontiers in American Newspapers, 1763
• Chapter 2: How the Western Antislavery Movement Redrafted American Freedom and Democracy
• Chapter 3: Ohio: At the Heart of History
• Chapter 4: A Conversation of Conspiracy: Regionalism and the Unstable Politics of the Early Republic, 1787–1807
• Chapter 5: Tippecanoe: An American Epic
• Chapter 6: Between Northeastern Stockholders and Southern Slaveowners: The 1856 Presidential Election and the Formation of the Midwest
• Chapter 7: German or Yankee? Defining Ohio Identity on the Pennsylvania Border
• Chapter 8: Where Does the Eastern Edge of the Midwest Fall in Ohio?
• Chapter 9: Italian Americans in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley: Creating Identity in the Industrial Midwest
• Chapter 10: “Opera Was Not Written for New York Alone”: The Middling Promotion of Operas in English on the Redpath Chautauqua Circuits
• Chapter 11: From Crass Materialists to Missionaries of Culture: A Regional History of Cultural Ascendance and Economic Decline through the Cleveland Orchestra
• Chapter 12: Locating Cleveland: Mapping Black Activism and Art in a “Way Post” City
• Chapter 13: Political Cultures in Conflict: Locating Ohio into a Region during and after the Era of the New Deal
• Chapter 14: The Divided Battleground: Presidential Voting in Ohio and the Midwest in the Twenty-First Century
• Contributors
• Index