SCALES #62: projected locality
Hello!
I hope you are all staying safe and healthy. Around here, as I think across many parts of the US, the last few days have been when the reality of the virus, and the inadequacy of the federal government’s response, has rapidly emerged. I’ve been working remotely; I’m glad the state’s director of health has pointed out the likely difference in scale between numbers of confirmed and actual cases; hopefully state-issued orders limiting crowds and the ability of the Cleveland Clinic to test for Covid-19 in-house (and even bring up the possibility of drive-thru testing!) will meaningfully slow the spread.
I’ve been feeling grateful to writers at The Atlantic for absolutely owning this beat, from maintaining the Covid Tracking Project to asking experts exactly what “social distancing” should mean. I appreciated yesterday’s LO #104 for providing what was advertised on the tin: “Some information + some soothing things”.
After the break, how this letter was shaping up in an earlier, simpler time.
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives on the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is capacious on purpose. You can unsubscribe at any time (link at bottom), forward, subscribe, or reply!
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In trying to get a better sense of the place I live, I started reading a local town history I picked up from the library, the sort of history that was written by a resident in the mid-20th century, with woodblock-style prints illustrating the early settlement, and stories of intrepid men from reputable Eastern families striking out to build an orderly society in the wilderness. Thankfully before I got too far in, I started reading Kristin L. Hoganson’s The Heartland: An American History.
Hoganson, a professor of history at UIUC, takes a much more critical look at the myth-making that transformed the American Middle West into the “heartland”. The introduction in particular neatly lays out how the town history I was reading fit squarely into a lineage of local history, which blossomed in the nineteenth century, “of a more calcified, antiquarian vein”:
“Starting with stories of the European explorers, these histories move on to the first white inhabitants and last Native Americans. The establishment of churches, courthouses, schools and parks all merit mention, as do gleaming hospitals, depots, and streetcar lines. These histories make nearly everyone within their ambit look good, by slighting everyone who didn’t fit the proper mold, whether transients, radicals, people of color, audacious women, unruly children, the disabled, the queer, or the poor.”
And further:
“Though long associated with boosterism and elite biases, theses histories have anchored another, less recognized, kind of politics. They have advanced a particular plot, the locality plot as it were. This plot starts and ends in the same place, for it is tidily fenced. There may be a nod here or there to distant ancestors, the backgrounds of new arrivals, the departures of native daughters and sons, but in general, the story unfolds within set boundaries, rarely venturing outward. […] Antiquarian local histories may help us see beyond our own time, but they reinforce the most myopic perceptions of place.”
As Hoganson herself acknowledges, the chapters in her book don’t entirely fill out the space her introductory call to arms opens up, of a counternarrative that provides exhaustively complete histories of people who don’t fit the “proper mold” or of global web of connections. Instead she digs into a few topics. Never did I think I would learn so much about the economics and racial attitudes of 19th-century livestock husbandry and export! Another imaginative chapter flips the “flyover states” trope into a series of vignettes considering the perspective of the flownover—with feet firmly planted in the massively engineered soil, and overhead the birds and later planes providing evidence of transnational linkages.
The strongest chapters to me, though, are about the Kickapoo and how the long, unjust history of their removal from a series of places, reveal foundational contradictions in the illusion of “rootedness” in the heartland myth.
“Having navigated place and space among similarly wayfaring peoples for generations, the Kickapoos ultimately found their foil in the pioneers. Their ideological foil, that is, for the pioneers were far more like the Kickapoos in reality than they cared to admit. Well before the creation of the heartland myth, the pioneers projected locality onto places where it had never existed. […] Having started out in many cases as squatters, as devoid of legal titles as the people they displaced, the pioneers and their descendents approached local histories as a way to register and publicize their claims.”
I still enjoyed the tales when I came back to the local town history, but with a better awareness of the ideologies behind them, and a lot more questions about what was being left out. Local history is a fascinating thing, but just as much for what’s obscured in the official accounts as for what’s included. While the local town history presented a tidily self-contained narrative, what I liked about Hoganson’s book is how it made me want to look outward and think more, about what she sees in the heartland: "settler colonialism, borderlands, empire building, agrarian solidarity, global consciousness, and a displaced people's struggle for the right to return. [...] [H]istories that did not advance ring by ring from the local to the global but that unfolded on multiple scales simultaneously."
Not to get too heavy-handed, but: "Multiple scales simultaneously." That's probably a useful thing to keep in mind in the days ahead.
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Thanks for reading! Again, be safe and look out for each other,
—Adam