Making the Rural Midwest: A Legal History, 1920-2020
Forthcoming 2026 with the University of North Carolina Press.
Making the Rural Midwest investigates the process of making “the rural”—constituting ruralness and rural communities—through law by taking a nuanced look at multiple narratives of change in the twentieth-century rural Midwest. In this book, I explore different ways that the rural is made through conflict and debate over law and policy. Never uniform or uncontested, local rural norms around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality persistently shaped the debates. Taking the reader from 1920 to the present day, six thematic chapters focus on different aspects of law that each play vital roles in shaping rural life and legal experience in the Midwest, including land and property law, infrastructure policy, the legal profession, education law, labor law, and health care policy.
Together, the chapters’ examples illuminate the meaningful, if circumscribed, ways many rural communities could continue to assert rural values and identities through legal mechanisms—in short, how the rural was manifested through legal and policy contests. Twentieth-century rural communities were forced to adapt to and endure upon a national landscape—literally and figuratively—dominated by suburban and urban communities and interests. Although not unique in their uses of legal mechanisms to craft community, rural communities’ efforts were distinctly shaped by rural geographies and social contexts.
Cows, Cars, and Criminals
My dissertation, “Cows, Cars, and Criminals: The Legal Landscape of the Rural Midwest, 1920-1975,” forms the foundation for my current manuscript project, Making the Rural Midwest.
The dissertation received both the Julien Mezey Dissertation Prize from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and Humanities and the dissertation prize from the Law & Society Association.
Abstract:
Law does not land on all spaces equally. Despite the attention to the relationship between space and power that urban and suburban historians of the twentieth century have brought to the fore, there is remarkably little scholarship examining rural communities on their own terms—not as aspiring cities. Cows, Cars, and Criminals: The Legal Landscape of the Rural Midwest, 1920-1975, tells a nuanced narrative of rural communities that is entangled with, but far more dynamic than, narrative tropes of rural decline and nostalgia. Like their counterparts nationwide in urban downtowns and suburban cul-de-sacs, twentieth-century rural Americans confronted challenges of inequality, but the legal efforts to maintain and improve rural communities in the face of those challenges took distinct forms shaped by rural geographies, economies, and social norms.
The dissertation argues that the process of legally reconstituting the rural was a central feature of twentieth-century America. Five case studies examine the remaking of the rural Midwest around issues typically considered quintessential twentieth-century urban challenges: policing and prosecution, land use and zoning, infrastructure and mobility, labor and economic opportunity, education equality, and local community organizing and advocacy. Each case study considers how legal power was gained, lost, and distributed in the rural context with respect to race, class, and gender. Together, the case studies illuminate meaningful, if circumscribed, ways many rural communities were able to continue to assert rural values and identities through legal mechanisms and adapt to an increasingly urban national landscape. At the same time, those rural norms, especially around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, were contested through individual uses of, and resistance to, the law.
There are still millions of Americans living under local governments that are neither urban nor suburban—communities for which current legal and historical scholarship inadequately accounts. Thus, the dissertation provides a new legal history of the rural Midwest that reveals neither a story of linear decline nor growth, but one of constant remaking.
Table of Contents
1. The People's Pendleton:
Rural Communities, Prosecutorial Discretion, and Masculinity, 1920-1928
2. Modern Pioneers in Oneida County:
Rural Zoning in Wisconsin, 1933-1953
3. Roads & Relocation:
Federal Highways, Native Relocation, and Rural Population Change in the Midwest after World War II
4. "Neighbors--yet strangers":
Controlling Rural Migrant Labor in Michigan before State v. Shack, 1942-1965
5. Tilting at Windmills:
Minnesota's Rural Schools in a Modern America, 1967-1972
Selected Archives
Bracero History Archive. BraceroArchive.org.
John Frederick Thaden Collection. Michigan History Center. Lansing, Michigan.
The Jose F. Trevino Chicano/Latino Activism Collections. Michigan State University Libraries, Special Collections. East Lansing, Michigan.
Julian Samora Papers. Michigan State University, University Archives. East Lansing, Michigan.
Margery Burns Papers. Minnesota Historical Society. St. Paul, Minnesota.
Chicago American Indian Oral Histories. Newberry Library. Chicago, Illinois.
Charles Edmund Pendleton Papers. State Historical Society of Iowa. Iowa City, Iowa.
Arthur F. Wilden Collection.State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin.
Arthur F. Wilden Collection. University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Michigan Farmworker Ministry Coalition Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan.