Race, family, and region in the nineteenth-century upper Midwest: A history of African, Indian, and European communities in the heartland

This dissertation explores race, family, and region in the rural upper Midwest from 1830 to 1930. It examines families of African, American Indian, and European descent who migrated to Wisconsin and Minnesota from the South, the eastern Great Lakes, New England and the mid-Atlantic, as well as France, Bohemia, Ireland, and Scandinavia. Since the Midwest is often known as America's "heartland"---that is, its best and most quintessentially "American" region---understanding race there is critical to understanding race in the nation.;Amid the gathering of diverse peoples from around the United States and around the globe, families who bridged African, Indian, and European identities played a vital role in founding and shaping rural neighborhoods and towns. They maintained vast trade networks and advanced commercial agriculture. They founded the schools and churches and planned the picnics and dances that formed the core of the upper Midwest's civic and social life. In the years before and just after Emancipation, the upper Midwest was characterized by racial ambiguity and fluidity. In communities where most residents had been free for generations or had significant Indian heritage, upper midwesterners inhabited uncertain and shifting racial identities. Elsewhere, where most residents had been enslaved and where none had Indian heritage, blackwhite binaries existed. However, the line between slavery and freedom remained ambiguous. Despite initial difficulties in some communities, racial toleration between European, African, and Indian peoples generally prevailed in the years after slavery's end. By the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, upper midwesterners who lived in communities where race had been fluid drew sharp lines between "black," white," and "Indian." In places where race had been fixed into black-white binaries, racial toleration declined. Class stratification, concerns about maintaining appropriate gender roles, and anxieties about European immigration contributed to these changes. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it became difficult to remember the multiple and malleable racial identities, as well as the toleration, that had once existed in the upper Midwest. In museums and historical markers, the region came to be known as "black" and "white," or sometimes just "white."...