The Annals of Iowa

Review of: The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, by James H. Madiso

Campney, Brent M. S.

The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland

Review of: The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandi

Mergenthal, Rebekah

The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

Mack, Jennifer E.

Clarke, Dustin S.

Working Hard and Living Out: Adolescence in Ninteenth-Century Dubuque

Review of: Poles in Illinois, by John Radzilowski and Ann Hetzel Gunkel

Galush, William J.

306      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
those of pivotal artists Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Quincy Adam 
Ward, Fredrick Law Olmstead, and Gutzon Borglum. 
Expanding the breadth and depth of his 2004 work The Public Art of 
Civil War Commemoration, this new study traces American attitudes con-
cerning memorials from the toppling of the equestrian statue of George 
III at the beginning of the American Revolution through the years after 
World War I. Brown argues that the creation and dedication of Civil War 
monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries re-
placed concepts of iconoclastic Republicanism, the American ideal of 
the yeoman farmer, and a voluntary army of citizen-soldiers. Ulti-
mately, he contends that “democratic postwar creativity gradually gave 
way to more violent, hierarchical, self-aggrandizing representations of 
social and political order” (7).  
For example, he traces criticism of early common soldier statues— 
posed with rifles raised—as too aggressive and militaristic. This resulted 
in their rejection in favor of the more passive and reflective “parade 
rest” and “flag bearer” poses in keeping with American attitudes to-
ward individualism, soldiering as a career, and the need of a standing 
army. But as Civil War commemoration evolved from memorializing 
the dead to honoring the veterans of the rebellion, by the centennial of 
the Revolution “Americans increasingly looked upon independence as 
primarily a military achievement rather than an inspirational political 
movement” (58) and returned to more active representations of victory.  
With recent controversies regarding the removal of Confederate 
memorials across the American South, Brown brings overdue and 
timely research on Civil War monuments in both the North and the 
South. As such, readers in Iowa should find this book especially inter-
esting as, unlike much of the state’s participation in the Civil War which 
took place on far away battlefields, statues and memorials can be found 
in public squares, parks, and cemeteries across the state. Each of the me-
morial types Brown explores in his book, obelisks, common soldier stat-
ues, equestrian, and allegorical figures, can be found in nearly every 
county in Iowa, throughout the Midwest, and across the nation. Read-
ing Brown’s work will give a deeper appreciation for these tangible re-
minders of Iowa’s participation in the American Civil War. 
 
Poles in Illinois, by John Radzilowski and Ann Hetzel Gunkel. Carbondale, 
IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2020. xii, 224 pp. Illustrations, ta-
bles and figures, graphs, appendixes, notes, index. $24.50, paperback. 
William J. Galush is Associate Professor History, Loyola University Chicago 
(emeritus). He is an expert on the Polish immigrant experience, and the au-
thor of For More than Bread: Community and Identity in American Polania (2006). 
Book Reviews and Notices      307 
Poles in Illinois affords an excellent overview of this ethnic group in the 
state of its greatest density of settlement. Because of the centrality of 
Chicago as the capital of American Polonia, it has a wider relevance 
than other state studies. The authors also address rural settlement in the 
state, utilizing jubilee books and other local sources to discuss small 
communities, all too often slighted. They write for a broad audience, 
but specialists in the field will find the work helpful. 
 The organization is thematic, with an underlying chronological devel-
opment that brings the work up to the present. A brief introduction on the 
history of Poland provides a helpful historical background. Most who left 
were peasants of modest means and education but with a scattering of 
educated lay and clerical persons who provided valuable leadership in 
a strange new land. While the vast bulk of Poles entered Illinois after the 
Civil War, settlement began in the 1850s, especially to the burgeoning 
city on the south end of Lake Michigan. 
 Family, faith, community, culture and work form the bulk of the 
study. Gunkel's contribution appears most clearly in "Kultura" (culture). 
She describes not only popular culture such as choral singing but also 
the role of dance (polka) and the surprisingly extensive business under-
girding music in general. Technology encountered ethnicity in Polish 
radio, which became important in the interwar years as an attractive 
new medium. 
Family was different since immigrants lacked the presence of an 
older generation, which both enlarged burdens on young parents but 
also allowed marriage for love rather than the arranged pattern often 
present in the homeland. American-born children were sometimes 
drawn to delinquency in Chicago and inter-generational relations un-
derwent strains not found in the ancestral villages. Both parents had to 
contribute to family support, typically with the husband in a low-skill 
industrial job and the wife often taking in boarders to supplement the 
budget. After elementary school, children tended to start working in or-
der to help provide for the family, something which slowed upward 
mobility. Ethnic leaders deplored this, but it remained a common pat-
tern before World War II.  
 Radzilowski shows effectively how the role of religion was very im-
portant in Polonia. Poles were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and the 
parish was the central institution of the community. While priests enjoyed 
high prestige, some immigrants were critical of their often-authoritarian 
style. In Illinois as elsewhere, this led to schismatic movements framed 
in a more democratic structure, notably the Polish National Catholic 
Church. But for most Poles and their offspring Roman Catholicism re-
mained the preferred expression of faith. The work concludes with two 
308      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
chapters on later waves of immigrants, whose background and experi-
ence in America differed significantly from the earlier overwhelmingly 
peasant immigration. 
 The authors enhance the value of the study by addressing rural set-
tlements in addition to the typical focus on the massive ethnic presence 
in Chicago. Well-chosen photographs and helpful charts enrich the 
work. The focus on large national fraternal federations headquartered 
in Chicago tends to over-emphasize the role of ideology as a salient fac-
tor; smaller settlements often showed cooperation and indifference to of-
ficial viewpoints propagated by Chicago-based national organs whose 
interest lay in distinguishing their organization from others. The book 
provides a useful and well-written overview of a major immigrant group 
in Illinois. 
 
 
Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in 
New Harmony, edited by Ben Nicholson and Michelangelo Sabatino. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. xlv, 351 pp. Maps, 
illustrations, notes, index. $40.00 paperback. 
Thomas A. Guiler is Assistant Professor of History and Public Humanities 
at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware. He is completing 
work on his book, The Handcrafted Utopia: Arts and Crafts Communities in 
Progressive America. 
Avant-Garde in the Cornfields is an impressive work that highlights the 
history of innovation, utopia, and spirituality in the built environment 
of New Harmony, Indiana. Over seven chapters and an introduction, 
the authors argue that through historic preservation and the erection of 
important works of modern architecture, New Harmony was revital-
ized as a spiritual retreat in the twentieth century—effectively striking 
a utopian through line from its Harmonist founding under George 
Rapp and the socialism and intellectual accomplishments of Robert 
Owen and William Maclure in the nineteenth century to the eco-spir-
itual vision of Jane Blaffer Owen in the twentieth century. Each chapter 
highlights a specific aspect of modern New Harmony: a biographical 
sketch of Jane and Kenneth Dale Owen, artistic patronage, and the time-
line of historic preservation before diving into specific architectural case 
studies. These case studies include, Philip Johnson’s Roofless Church, 
Frederick Kiesler’s unrealized grotto, New Harmony’s gardens, and 
Richard Meier’s Athenaeum. This is ultimately an unexpected and well-
argued work that is sure to become an important resource for scholars 


English

Poles in Illinois

Review of: "Campaign for Wilson's Creek: The Fight for Missouri Begins," by Kenneth L. Lyftogt

Lyftogt, Kenneth L.

Campaign for Wilson's Creek: The Fight for Missouri Begins

Hunter, Edith

From Fair View Farm to Parkview Heights: Involuntary Annexation and the Middle American Dream

Review of: The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783–1840, by Kristopher Maulden

Etcheson, Nicole

288      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
known events. For instance, the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty conference gar-
ners far less discussion than a separate, all-Indigenous, peace conference 
between Lakotas and Crows that same year (220–21). Hämäläinen also 
pays special attention to events that appear in several winter counts, 
such as the shocking murder of Lakota leader Mato Oyuhi at American 
hands in 1854. Using Native sources to guide the historical narrative, 
Lakota America holds true to its goal of “decidedly [telling] a history of the 
Lakotas, written from sources that seek to convey their perspective” (8). 
 Lakota America is an important addition to the fields of North Amer-
ican imperial, Indigenous, and even environmental histories. Yet, like in 
Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen’s use of an imperial lens to compare set-
tler colonial and Indigenous polities as near equivalents is problematic. 
As scholars such as Nick Estes have pointed out, Euro-American settler 
colonial states, with their emphasis on controlling land and racializa-
tion, are fundamentally different from Native societies, even at their 
most violent, expansionist, and exclusionary. Claiming the Western 
Sioux built a “Lakota Empire” as Hämäläinen does throughout Lakota 
America conceals more differences than it reveals similarities. Indeed, 
Hämäläinen comes close to admitting as much himself. “The Lakota 
empire was at its core, an empire of equals,” Hämäläinen argues, yet 
“unlike most empires, they did not rely on force or codified hierarchi-
zation . . . Lakotas’ was an expansive, all-embracing understanding of 
belonging that recognized no color line” (243–44). If Lakotas were able 
to embrace even former enemies as kin and as equals, one wonders if 
“empire” is the proper term for them at all. Using an imperial lens to 
describe Native survival and resistance in the face of Euro-America set-
tler colonialism is inadequate, but in many other ways Lakota America is 
a fine piece of historical writing, of use to virtually any scholar of the 
American past. 
 
 
The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783–1840, by 
Kristopher Maulden. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2019. 
xvii, 261 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00, hard-
cover. 
Nicole Etcheson is the Alexander M. Bracken Professor of History at Ball 
State University in Indiana. She is the author of The Emerging Midwest: Up-
land Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest (1996) and most 
recently A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community (2011). 
In 1986, the late Andrew R. L. Cayton’s classic The Frontier Republic: Ide-
ology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (1986) traced the tension 
Book Reviews and Notices      289 
between Jeffersonian Republicans’ emphasis on democracy and Feder-
alists’ promotion of order and economic development in the Ohio coun-
try. Cayton saw the two parties as achieving a synthesis of views with 
Republicans adopting many Federalist policies. While Cayton confined 
that study to his native Ohio, Kristopher Maulden expands the focus to 
look at Indiana and Illinois as well. Maulden claims a contribution to 
studies of the Federalist Party, little examined outside of New England, 
and the growing literature on the trans-Appalachian frontier. 
Cayton and his historiographical predecessors such as John D. 
Barnhart in Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the Plantation in the 
Ohio Valley, 1775–1818 (1953) emphasized settlers’ desire for political 
power in a contest with Federalist elites such as the Northwest Terri-
tory’s Governor Arthur St. Clair. Maulden highlights the Federalist-
built institutions that made frontier settlement possible: the military 
which wrested the frontier from its native inhabitants; the land office 
that provided secure titles to settlers; and expanded government that 
spent money on internal improvements and education. Maulden says 
that settlers “preferred the libertarian rhetoric of Jeffersonian and Jack-
sonian democracy,” (7) but they relied on the governmental structures 
Federalists created. The frontiersmen saw themselves as “rugged indi-
vidualists” (7) even as they relied on and expected help from an activist 
government. 
The Federalist Frontier’s narrative will be familiar to historians of the 
region and the era. The offer by the Ohio Company, a land speculation 
venture by Revolutionary War veterans, to buy land in the region 
spurred Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance providing a gov-
ernment for the new territory. The Confederation and early national pe-
riods, however, coincided with war in the Ohio Valley as Indian tribes 
contested the intrusion of whites into the region. Under the presidency 
of Thomas Jefferson, officials such as William Henry Harrison, governor 
of Indiana Territory, used trade and treaties to acquire land from the 
Indians until resistance from the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and 
Tenskwatawa caused Harrison to resort to military force. Maulden does 
not spend much time on the War of 1812, but has two chapters on the 
post-war period arguing that, despite the alleged death of the Federal-
ists after the Hartford Convention, Federalists still influenced the region 
through their support for education and business.  
In Maulden’s account, unlike other histories of the Old Northwest, 
there is less of the conflict between settlers and the territorial govern-
ments led by St. Clair in what became Ohio and William Henry Harrison 
in Indiana. Instead, Maulden concentrates on the legacy of Federalism 
in the region even after Jefferson’s election. Maulden contends that 
290      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Federalists remained influential in the region and that western Jefferso-
nians “repurposed Federalist institutions” (90). Although old Federal-
ists lost political office, their program laid the foundation for the later 
Whig Party and its adherence to the American System of a national 
bank, protective tariffs, and government money for internal improve-
ments. An epilogue looks at Abraham Lincoln as the heir of the Feder-
alist frontier. 
Maulden might do more to acknowledge the limitations of the ac-
tivist government he sees in the Old Northwest. He frequently quotes 
the expansive language of public documents promising free public ed-
ucation. Although he acknowledges that “progress varied” (166), actual 
funding for educational systems in the states of the lower Midwest fell 
very much short of the rhetoric. In describing an arc that reaches from 
the Federalism of Arthur St. Clair to the Whiggery of Abraham Lincoln, 
Maulden misses the role of class. Lincoln may have embraced Federalist 
policies, but the democratic ethos of the Jeffersonians made possible the 
poorly educated, poorly dressed, homespun Lincoln’s rise to political 
power. 
In effect, Maulden makes an observation about the early American 
frontier that many commentators have made about the modern West: 
small government Westerners rely more heavily on government subsi-
dies than do Easterners. Both in the early republic and today, political 
rhetoric and political reality are often at odds. 
 
 
Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett in 1833: Unsettling the Mythic West, edited 
by Michael A. Lofaro. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 
2019. cv, 478 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index. $60.00 hard-
cover. 
Reviewer Patrick J. Jung is a professor of history and anthropology at the 
Milwaukee School of Engineering in Wisconsin. He is the author of The 
Black Hawk War of 1832 (2007), and “Lonely Sentinel: A Military History of 
Fort Madison, 1808–1813” (Annals of Iowa, 2016). 
A trifecta of biographies appeared in 1833: one each on Daniel Boone, 
the Sauk war leader Black Hawk, and David Crockett. Common to 
these books, according to Michael A. Lofaro, was a shift in Americans’ 
perception of the frontier and the persons—both Native American and 
white—who resided there. Central to this shift was the election of An-
drew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 and the mythos of a new age 
that celebrated the self-made man who rose to prominence despite 
humble origins. Lofaro writes that these works, in presenting men cut 


The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783-1840

Review of: The Interior Borderlands: Regional Identity in the Midwest and Great Plains, edited by Jon K. Lauck

Rees, Amanda

285 
Book Reviews and Notices 
The Interior Borderlands: Regional Identity in the Midwest and Great Plains, 
edited by Jon K. Lauck. Sioux Falls: The Center for Western Studies, 
2019. iii, 327 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, index. $15.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Amanda Rees is professor of geography at Columbus State Uni-
versity in Georgia. She established the Columbus Community Geography 
Center and received the 2018 Helen Ruth Aspaas SAGE Award for out-
standing Stand Alone Geographic Educators. 
Embracing ethnicity, fiction, film, food, gender, geography, geology, his-
tory, memoir, and religion, this edited collection draws comparisons 
and distinctions between two US regions: the Midwest and the Great 
Plains. It is made up of twenty short chapters, many no more than 9–10 
pages and several of which have no organizing theses or conclusions. 
This book should perhaps best be understood as a series of think pieces. 
This review focuses on a few of its less successful submissions while 
highlighting several more novel approaches.  
One impactful theme left unaddressed in the book is the tension 
between the “region as place” and the “region as process” perspectives. 
This reviewer recommends beginning the book with its last chapter, au-
thored by Michael J. Mullin, so that readers can more easily place this 
tension into a broader historical and cultural context, and recognize the 
tension that is riven between the chapters.  
At first glance, the application of economic geography by James S. 
Aber et al. to contrast the settlement of the two regions suggests a novel 
approach to contemporary regional studies. This quantitative approach, 
however, had its heyday in the mid-twentieth century and has well un-
derstood limits. Applying location theory to late eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century human settlement patterns without a nuanced cultural 
and historical context does not add much to the broader discussion of 
region as a theoretical location.  
Gleaves Whitney’s reflection on the “there” in “There is no There” 
embraces the conservative approach to “region as place.” This chapter 
rails against cultural theory, assuming that region is an acultural con-
tainer in which things happen, rather than understanding region as a 
cultural construction that changes over time, space, and the viewer’s 
subjectivities. Indeed, this essay might best be characterized as defen-
sive, essentialist, and occasionally boosterish. Inspired by the work of 
286      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
geographer Pete Shortridge, Christopher Laigen makes some headway 
in response to Whitney’s work, drawing our attention to the lack of re-
flection on how regional residents understand their region. Laigen, and 
subsequently Mullin, focus on residents’ perceptions of regions that 
challenge the fixed boundaries that are sometimes drawn by “region as 
place” writers.  
There are four chapters that explore new approaches and more con-
temporary evidence to reflect upon region and boundary. Rachel Han-
del’s comparison of late twentieth-century Plains and midwestern 
women’s memoirs highlights some remarkable themes and contrasts in-
cluding the use of landscape, region as emotion, and reinvention both 
to stay and to leave. Handel shares approaches that both connect and 
are at odds across this regional boundary. Debbie A. Hanson’s compar-
ison of post-1970s regional cookbooks in bordering states of the northern 
Plains/Midwest offers a liminal boundary over which these cultural 
productions reach. Jay M. Price’s use of religion to explore the Mid-
west’s southeastern border helps reposition the discussion of dynamic 
boundaries and liminal spaces away from the Plains and opens up some 
new and interesting questions about how boundaries function. Finally, 
Anna Thompson Hajdik’s well-written reflection on cinematic repre-
sentations of “fly over country” provides a timely reflection on the 
Great Recession and the election of Donald J. Trump. These four texts 
work to balance out the sometimes all-too-familiar terrain of Great 
Plains-Midwest regional analysis that often privileges the past.  
 
 
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämä-
läinen. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven & London: 
Yale University Press, 2019. ix, 529 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, glos-
sary, index. $35.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Stephen Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the Uni-
versity of St. Thomas in Minnesota. His book manuscript is an environmental 
history of the Black Hills and examines the implications of settler colonial-
ism for Native people in cities in the twentieth century. 
Lakota America is Pekka Hämäläinen’s spiritual sequel to his award-win-
ning 2009 book, The Comanche Empire. Both projects cover the rise and 
fall of powerful nomadic Indigenous societies on the Great Plains of 
North America, arguing that horse-and-bison social and economic sys-
tems held the keys to Lakota and Comanche power. Lakota America’s 
subtitle—a History of Indigenous Power—is the principle difference be-
tween this and Hämäläinen’s earlier work. Unlike his previous 


The Interior Borderlands: Regional Identity in the Midwest and Great Plains

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 79 no. 2 Spring 2020

Review of: Kansas Baseball, 1858–1941, by Mark E. Eberle

Lomax, Michael E.

Book Reviews and Notices      95 
Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West, by Prentiss Ingraham, edited by 
Sandra K. Sagala. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. ix, 349 pp. 
Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $55 hardcover, 
$29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South 
Bend. His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the 
Oregon Trail, and the military history of the nineteenth-century U.S. West. 
In 1854, eight-year-old William F. Cody moved with his family from 
Scott County, Iowa, to Kansas, where he began a kind of apprentice-
ship—as hunter, scout, and Indian fighter—that led to his becoming the 
iconic hero Buffalo Bill. His life, like Daniel Boone’s or Kit Carson’s, suited 
an American narrative about taming the wilderness. Proving a shame-
less champion of his image, Cody welcomed its dissemination. It was 
reshaped and retold in dime novels, in theatre productions (some writ-
ten by Prentiss Ingraham and often starring Cody), in an 1879 auto-
biography published when he was only 33, in his famous Wild West 
Show, and eventually in silent movies.  
 As a writer, Ingraham achieved his own legendary status by pub-
lishing 600 novels; of those, 287 used Cody as the protagonist (311–21). 
This volume, edited by Sandra K. Sagala, an independent scholar who 
has written excellent studies of Cody on the stage and in films, is a bi-
ography originally serialized between July 13, 1895, and May 16, 1896, 
in the Duluth Press, a newspaper partially financed by Cody but oper-
ated by his sister Helen and her husband, Hugh Wetmore. Ingraham 
follows Cody’s autobiography, often verbatim, embellishing here and 
there to flesh out an episode, add excitement, or offer lessons for young 
readers about personal responsibility, courage, and devotion to family. 
Even Turk, Cody’s childhood dog, is given a principal role to evoke 
those values. Ultimately, this is not only a book about Cody but also a 
fun example of nineteenth-century popular literature. 
 
 
Kansas Baseball, 1858–1941, by Mark E. Eberle. Lawrence: University 
Press of Kansas, 2017. xiii, 308 pp. Map, tables, illustrations, graphs, ap-
pendix, notes, bibliography, index. $45 hardcover, $27.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Michael E. Lomax retired as professor of sport history from the 
University of Iowa. He is the author of Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860–
1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary (2003). 
Mark Eberle has written a thoroughly engrossing monograph on the his-
tory of baseball in the state of Kansas from the mid–nineteenth century to 
the eve of World War II. He chronicles baseball’s early history in the state, 
the local fans and civic leaders who constructed the ballparks, and the 
96      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
ways the national pastime expressed the state’s identity and its diverse 
communities of African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic 
Americans. Baseball clubs embodied the businesses, churches, schools, 
military units, and prisons that made up these towns’ societal structure, 
as they wrestled with the complexities of rural and urban formation. 
 Kansas Baseball is well researched. Eberle immersed himself in local 
and regional newspapers, county and city archives, and recent websites 
to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the teams and ballparks, 
many of which are still in use today. In 1893, for example, the first base-
ball grounds were constructed on the site that housed Hibbs-Hooten 
Field in Sellers Park in Wellington, Kansas. By 1909, Wellington hosted 
a minor league team in the Class D Kansas State League. In 1964 the 
Wellington community built a concrete grandstand, with wooden 
benches and a metal roof at a cost of roughly $35,000. Today the ball-
park is the summer home of the Wellington Heat of the Jayhawk Colle-
giate Baseball League. 
 Eberle’s narrative would have been stronger if he had provided a 
more definitive examination of how these towns and teams addressed 
the complex interplay of how urbanization affected U.S. sporting pat-
terns. In 1820 the United States had no baseball or even any modern 
sport culture in general. By the 1860s, however, several forces interacted 
to devise the modern sporting culture. Simultaneously, the United 
States underwent a transformation from a rural society to an urban one. 
Since the overwhelming focus has been on the urbanization process and 
the rise of the metropolitan city, Eberle missed an opportunity to show 
how this phenomenon played out in the rural towns of the Wheat State. 
 Nevertheless, Kansas Baseball makes a significant contribution to 
scholarly research on the national pastime specifically and U.S. society 
in general. Eberle has uncovered a forgotten world of the history of 
baseball in the United States. It is an enjoyable and interesting book. 
 
 
We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, by R. Richard 
Wagner. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019. 431 pp. Il-
lustrations, table, notes, index. $28.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Christopher Hommerding is an independent scholar and public 
historian in Minnesota. His article, “ ‘As Gay as Any Gypsy Caravan’: Grant 
Wood and the Queer Pastoral at the Stone City Art Colony” appeared in 
the Annals of Iowa (2015). 
We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History is the first of two 
volumes by R. Richard Wagner exploring the LGBTQ history of Wis-
consin. In this volume, Wagner presents an expansive array of Wiscon- 


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