“There Are Many Midwests”: A Roundtable on the 2021 Midwestern History Association Conference

Abstract

The editors of the Indiana Magazine of History attended the seventh annual meeting of the Midwestern History Conference, held online on May 26–27, 2021, to study the state of the field. They found an association of scholars using the study of the past to reflect on the problems and tensions of the modern Midwest. Panelists examined midwesterners’ changing attitudes toward public health and mental health, their radical alterations of natural and social landscapes, the efforts of Latinx and Black midwesterners to make a living and create a place for themselves in an often-hostile social environment, the flourishing of progressive policies and radical politics in an allegedly reactionary region, and the extent to which narratives of loss and the uncanny shape perceptions of the region’s distinctiveness. The editors also found a scholarly community dealing ably with the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic and the virtual meeting environment that it mandated.