The national settler Midwest: Peter S. Onuf, ‘Rethinking The Midwest and the Nation’, Middle West Review, 11, 2, 2025, pp. 577-582 | settler colonial studies blog

The national settler Midwest: Peter S. Onuf, ‘Rethinking The Midwest and the Nation’, Middle West Review, 11, 2, 2025, pp. 577-582

01Jun25

Excerpt: Celebration of the Ordinance—the original organic law of the states that would be carved out of the new nation’s northern borderlands—was overshadowed by simultaneous celebration of the drafting of the federal Constitution. Historically, local patriots took pride in the coincidence of national and regional beginnings. In the free land north and west of the Ohio River, they claimed, old sectional distinctions dissolved, and the national promise was fulfilled. The Northwest Territory and its successor states constituted a region that transcended regionalism, drawing streams of immigrants from—and through—all parts of the union. The Civil War seemed to confirm this identification or conflation of region and nation, and historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” (1893) marked its apotheosis: America’s distinctively democratic character was forged on its first great settlement frontier, the land of the free—and not in the Southern “slave power’s” empire of slavery.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed