"Forged on the frontier": John Lauck's Lost Region argues Midwestern history holds key to America, past and future, and it's time to get reacquainted.
"But Midwesterners, as Jon K. Lauck stresses in a plea for renewed attention to this “lost region” and its history, aren’t so much provincial as they are populist, staunchly democratic, rooted in their communities and believers in individualism and self-reliance. In our standard accounts of early American history, we tend to emphasize the sophisticated East and the troubled South, yet as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed with his usual shrewdness, “Europe extends to the Alleghenies, while America lies beyond.” The fundamental spirit of our nation was forged on the frontier." -- Michael Dirda, the Washington Post
