Review of: "Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest," a part of the "Early American Places series," by Kenneth H. Wheeler

Taylor, Richard S.

English

Dada/Surrealism

Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest

The Annals of Iowa

Review of:  Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest,  a part of the  Early American Places series,  by Kenneth H. Wheeler

Iowa Research Online

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 72 Number 1 (Winter 2013) pps. 64-66 
Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the 
American Midwest 
Richard S. Taylor 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2013 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Taylor, Richard S. "Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the 
American Midwest." The Annals of Iowa 72 (2013), 64-66. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.1674 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
64      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American 
Midwest, by Kenneth H. Wheeler. Early American Places. DeKalb: 
Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. x, 156 pp. Maps, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $38.00 cloth.  
Reviewer Richard S. Taylor is the retired chief historian for the Historic Sites 
Division, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. His publications include West-
ern Colleges as “Securities of Intelligence and Virtue”: The Towne-Eddy Report of 
1846 (1980). 
Does the Midwest possess a distinctive regional culture worthy of 
study? Kenneth H. Wheeler thinks so and sets out in Cultivating Re-
gionalism to identify and describe a distinctive cluster of typically mid-
western attitudes and practices that he believes were fostered by the 
many small liberal arts colleges that proliferated across the region’s 
landscape in the nineteenth century. He does not presume to describe 
the regional culture as a whole, only certain important features of that 
culture hitherto neglected by scholars. The book draws on his 1999 dis-
sertation but bears little resemblance to that work. Wheeler deserves 
credit for performing the arduous task of carefully selecting portions 
of his dissertation, supplementing them with further research, and re-
organizing the whole into a concise, clearly written, and well-developed 
book.  
 Neither midwestern culture nor the small religiously affiliated 
liberal arts colleges with which Wheeler concerns himself have fared 
particularly well among historians. The analytical utility of place gen-
erally and region in particular has seemed trivial to scholars obsessed 
with race, class, and gender. Even those cognizant of regionalism as a 
useful category have preferred New England or the South to the Mid-
west. Some have doubted that a coherent midwestern culture exists, 
while others have criticized the region for what they perceive as its 
mind-numbing blandness and provincial conformity. Even those who 
have recognized the region’s remarkable diversity have ignored its 
particularity by dismissively characterizing it as a microcosm of 
America. But since the 1990s there has been a small yet unmistakable 
upsurge of scholarly interest in regionalism exemplified by Regionalism 
and the Humanities (2008), edited by Timothy Mahoney and Wendy J. 
Katz, and Indiana University Press’s The American Midwest: An Interpre-
tive Encyclopedia (2007). Cultivating Regionalism makes a fine addition 
to that growing literature. 
 Historians have tended to describe the small nineteenth-century 
liberal arts colleges founded by religious denominations and local 
boosters in what is now the Midwest as projections of New England 
culture. Wheeler thinks not. He argues that they were fundamentally 
Book Reviews and Notices       65 
home-grown institutions propagating indigenous values. Far removed 
from national centers of power and wealth, western college founders 
capitalized on state legislatures eager to grant charters and plunged 
into a democratic environment largely unfettered by tradition to create 
institutions nicely tailored to their small-town and rural constituents.  
 The manual labor programs that proved short-lived in the 
tradition-bound East and aristocratic South survived in western 
colleges long enough to integrate farming into student life, which 
fostered an anti-elitist producer ethic and laid a foundation for the 
later emergence of scientific agriculture as an academic discipline. 
Coeducation flourished in the West prior to the Civil War, providing 
opportunities for women and promoting egalitarian attitudes. Wheeler 
argues that midwestern colleges disseminated “a culture of useful-
ness” grounded in Protestantism’s drive to reform society and “a 
mostly middle-class emphasis on practical and productive labor for 
the common good” (54). He finds that western students were older, 
poorer, and more pious than their eastern and southern counterparts. 
Receptive to political diversity, they grew accustomed through their 
literary societies to wrestling with ideas and settling their differences 
democratically through debate, making them less likely to riot than 
students in other regions. Not surprisingly, midwestern liberal arts 
colleges were, by the close of the nineteenth century, producing more 
scientists than schools in any other region, which Wheeler traces to a 
pragmatic, hands-on empiricism and respect for scientific inquiry, 
again indigenous and traceable to the small colleges. He even specu-
lates that midwestern culture flowered at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century into “a common heartland consciousness” (89) that in-
spired the writers, social reformers, and scientists of the Progressive 
era. 
 Readers put off by the rather boosterish tone and thesis-driven 
character of Wheeler’s work should keep in mind that he claims only 
to be recovering certain neglected aspects of the region’s history, not 
to be telling the whole story, and that is a worthy undertaking given the 
contempt that many scholars have heaped upon the Midwest and its 
small colleges. Yet Cultivating Regionalism is thoughtful and suggestive 
rather than conclusive given the author’s heavy reliance on evidence 
drawn from what might be called the antebellum educational estab-
lishment of Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Methodist colleges. 
His important insights deserve further testing relative to the smaller 
denominations and ethnic schools to which he devotes only passing 
attention and the Catholic institutions that he neglects entirely. Finally, 
his depiction of the early liberal arts college with its evangelical ethos 
66      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
as democratic and science-friendly seems a bit overdrawn. Students 
of American religion, including Amanda Porterfield, Tracy Fessenden, 
and John Lardas Modern, are raising serious questions about Nathan 
Hatch’s evangelicalism-as-a-democratic-movement thesis, which has 
reigned triumphant for several decades and is built into Wheeler’s 
argument. And while the hands-on empiricism of the natural philoso-
phy (science) taught in the old-time colleges may have inspired in-
ventors and explorers, it drew on an understanding of moral and 
physical reality as divinely created, mechanical, and law-governed 
that ruled out the kind of open-ended skeptical inquiry upon which 
modern science depends. 
 
 
God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War, 
by George C. Rable. The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 586 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth. 
Reviewer Bryon C. Andreasen is a research historian at the Abraham Lincoln 
Presidential Library & Museum. He has written several articles about religion 
during the Civil War. 
Historians have written hundreds of volumes discussing the origin, 
course, and outcome of the Civil War. But the “absence of virtually 
any reference to religious forces in the standard Civil War narratives is 
remarkable,” suggests award-winning Civil War historian George C. 
Rable, adding that this “would have struck those in the Civil War gen-
eration as very odd” (396). Indeed, Rable’s thesis rests on the proposi-
tion that for many nineteenth-century Americans God’s intervention 
in human history was an unquestioned verity of life. Thus, “many 
people on both sides of the conflict turned to religious faith to help ex-
plain the war’s causes, course, and consequences” (9). This religious 
worldview provided a providential narrative that “offered ways to 
give all the bloodshed some higher and presumably nobler purpose” (9). 
 This book is an ambitious comprehensive religious history of the 
war covering both the North and the South, the battle front and the 
home front, soldiers and civilians, clergy and laity, men and women. 
Rable provides a cross section of denominational and theological per-
spectives that reaches beyond the dominant voices of the evangelical 
Protestant denominations and their ministers and theologians to in-
clude Catholics, Jews, and others. But the book is much more than just 
a wartime history of the churches. 
 Rable begins by reviewing the religious state of America going in-
to the war, noting that religious faith had provided no cross-sectional 


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