The Annals of Iowa

Review of "Making an Anti-Slavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom" by Graham A. Pec

Hansen, Stephen

Book Reviews and Notices      199 
Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: A Guide to Lincoln’s Eighth Judicial Circuit, by 
Guy C. Fraker. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. xiii, 130 
pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, bibliography, index. $21.95 paperback. 
Reviewer John A. Lupton is the executive director of the Illinois Supreme 
Court Historic Preservation Commission. He was formerly an assistant 
editor on The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and has written extensively 
about Lincoln as a lawyer. 
Guy Fraker’s new book is the third in a series that offers guided tours of 
Lincoln sites in Illinois. Specifically, Fraker leads us around central Illi-
nois on the Eighth Judicial Circuit during the height of Lincoln’s circuit-
riding practice. The guide provides valuable information about high-
ways, roads, and streets, including a key to different types of markers 
and wayside exhibits. Many illustrations show readers the people and 
places Lincoln experienced. Fraker demonstrates that Lincoln’s time on 
the circuit served two important purposes: building a substantial law 
practice while also creating a network of political operatives.  
 Fraker does not delve into scholarly issues related to Lincoln’s law 
practice, but this book is not meant for that. The purpose is to hold 
the reader’s hand while Fraker points out many Lincoln sites in a very 
well-done driving and walking tour of Lincoln’s circuit law practice. 
The book provides tidbits about some of Lincoln’s cases and personal 
interactions—not enough to know full details, but enough to whet the 
appetite. As a result, a larger “For Further Reading” section would 
have been helpful to direct readers to some of those cases. Surprisingly 
absent were the two Papers of Abraham Lincoln publications on 
Lincoln’s law practice. The four-volume book edition, particularly, has 
two in-depth tours of Lincoln’s circuit. Minor quibbles aside, Fraker 
succeeds in giving readers a taste of what life was like on the circuit 
with Lincoln, whose practice mirrored that of many attorneys in the 
Midwest. 
 
 
Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom, 
by Graham A. Peck. Urbana, Champaign, and Chicago: University of 
Illinois Press, 2017. ix, 264 pp. Maps, appendix, notes, index. $34.95 
hardcover. 
Reviewer Stephen Hansen is emeritus dean and professor of history at 
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is the author of The Making 
of the Third Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850–1876 (1980). 
In this study of the rise of antislavery politics, Graham A. Peck uses 
Illinois as the context for examining the political conflict over slavery 
from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to the election of Abraham 
200      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Lincoln in 1860. Peck’s well-written and insightful analysis argues that 
Lincoln’s ideas and leadership wedded the concept of freedom with 
national expansion and economic opportunity into a compelling anti-
slavery ideology for the Republican Party. While not attempting to 
provide a major reinterpretation of the formation of the Republican 
Party, Peck offers a useful, lively, and discerning study of the evolution 
of antislavery politics. 
 Peck, professor of history at Saint Xavier University in Chicago 
and writer, director, and producer of a documentary on Stephen A. 
Douglas, examines antislavery politics using Illinois as a microcosm 
for the nation. He argues five major points: (1) antislavery politics 
cannot be properly understood without recognizing that slavery was a 
constant issue in American politics since the Northwest Ordinance of 
1787; (2) the role of Northern Democrats as political centrists in the 
Sectional Crisis has not been fully appreciated; (3) Northern Demo-
crats, even though political centrists, were essentially proslavery; (4) 
the ability of Lincoln and the Republican Party to link antislavery with 
nationalism was key in transforming the antislavery movement into a 
major political party; and (5) secession was the culmination of a funda-
mental conflict between slavery and freedom, deeply rooted in Ameri-
can history, and not the result of a failure to compromise in the 1850s. 
 Peck does an excellent job of describing the paradoxes and contra-
dictions of antislavery politics in Illinois. He does so by deftly arguing 
that economic interests, racial attitudes, religious convictions, and 
definitions of freedom all shaped antislavery politics but with varying 
degrees of emphasis. He explains, for example, how the motives of 
antislavery voters in 1824 who rejected an attempt to make slavery 
constitutionally legal in Illinois differed from those of the antislavery 
voters who defeated the Democratic Party in 1854 in the wake of the 
Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1824 voters were concerned primarily with 
slavery’s degradation of labor along with a racist concern about bring-
ing more African Americans into the state. In 1854 antislavery voters 
focused more on the future of Free Soil in the territories and the bro-
ken promise of the Missouri Compromise. Peck’s nuanced description 
of antislavery politics in Illinois illustrates well the nation’s complex 
and uncomfortable history of slavery, race, and politics. 
 Another strength of Peck’s book is his explanation of how Abraham 
Lincoln framed antislavery politics. Peck argues that Lincoln “turned 
the moralism of abolitionists into the duty of the nation” (178). More 
specifically, he maintains that Lincoln transformed antislavery into a 
nationalistic purpose by arguing that universal freedom was the guid-
ing principle of the nation. According to Peck, Lincoln’s ability to link 
Book Reviews and Notices      201 
antislavery with national values, expansion, and promise made a 
compelling ideology in the Free States that transformed the United 
States into an antislavery nation in 1860. 
 Peck’s analysis could have been strengthened by explaining more 
fully his use of the terms slavery and freedom. The way Peck juxtaposes 
these terms implies a twenty-first–century meaning that seems to dis-
count the nineteenth-century proslavery view that white slaveowners’ 
political, social, and economic freedom depended on the enslavement 
of African Americans. Closely related to this issue is Peck’s insistence 
that slavery had been a central political issue for the nation since 1787. 
It’s doubtful that a majority of the people living in the antebellum 
United States saw it that way. Even Lincoln didn’t become motivated 
by slavery as a political issue until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. 
Lastly, Peck could have benefited from better use of electoral data. His 
aggregated voting results broken down by geographic region add little 
to the analysis, a problem that could have been easily addressed by 
using already existing township- and county-level voting data. 
 Regardless of these reservations, Peck has provided a useful and 
interesting framework for understanding antislavery politics in Illinois 
and in the nation. His argument that Lincoln and the Republicans 
fused a view of the past with the issues of the present and a vision for 
the future into a powerful nationalistic antislavery ideology is compel-
ling and insightful. Scholars and students of the Midwest and of the 
Sectional Crisis will find this book an important addition to the litera-
ture on antislavery politics. 
 
 
Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of 
Kentucky and Missouri, by Aaron Astor. Conflicting Worlds: New Di-
mensions of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 
University Press, 2012, 2017. viii, 332 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, 
notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 paperback. 
The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America, by Matthew E. 
Stanley. Urbana, Champaign, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 
2017. xi, 268 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, 
index. $95.00 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Kevin M. Gannon is professor of history and director of the 
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Grand View University. 
He is working on a continental history of the Civil War era. 
The American Civil War was a many-faceted conflict, but one common 
thread runs through the various strands of the era’s conflict: in an es-


English

Making an Anti-Slavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

Review of: "The Driftless Reader" edited by Curt Meine and Keefe Keeley

Nunnally, Patrick

190 
Book Reviews and Notices 
The Driftless Reader, edited by Curt Meine and Keefe Keeley. Madison: 
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. xxxix, 348 pp. Maps, illustrations, 
bibliography, index. $26.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Patrick Nunnally is coordinator of the River Life Program, part 
of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. His 
Ph.D. dissertation (University of Iowa, 1990) was “Visions of Sustainable 
Place: Voice, Land, and Culture in Rural America.” 
The “Driftless Region,” so called because the most recent glaciations 
missed the area and therefore did not leave the deep glacial “drift” 
soils that characterize so much of the upper Midwest, has long been 
recognized as anomalous within the broader historical and geospatial 
contexts of the Midwest. The terrain is steep and rocky, with bluffs 
drained by a network of rivers, most prominently the Mississippi. Dis-
tinctive topography has created conditions for specialized ecologies; 
plant communities found here are more characteristic of distant places. 
The area’s lands and waters, near the watershed boundaries of the Mis-
sissippi River basin and the Great Lakes, have given rise to distinctive 
historical patterns of settlement, resource exploitation, and conservation 
that are interesting and nationally significant. 
 The region in question encompasses southeastern Minnesota, 
southwestern Wisconsin, generally along the Wisconsin River, extreme 
northwestern Illinois in the area around Galena, and northeastern Iowa. 
It centers around the historic lead mining region, includes rivers that 
were major fur trade and lumber transportation routes, and bears 
many earthen mounds left by indigenous inhabitants over thousands 
of years. A number of books have explored this place, usually through 
the medium of personal essay and reflection. Editors Curt Meine and 
Keefe Keeley pursue a different approach, excerpting 81 works of 
prose and poetry created across a span of some 350 years, adding a 
number of visual works as well such as maps, painting, etchings, and 
drawings. Meine is a conservation biologist who is the author of a 
well-known biography of Aldo Leopold, and Keeley manages a re-
gional nonprofit that brings ecological and agricultural knowledge 
together. Their choices are judicious and reflect well both the historical 
and biological/physical systems that make up this complicated place. 
 The book is composed of 12 sections, which are arranged more or 
less chronologically. Each section is headed by a short overview, and 
each piece is introduced by the editors. This editorial touch offers an 
Book Reviews and Notices      191 
important “wayfinding” in a book like this, which has poetry and 
memoir juxtaposed with nineteenth-century scientific journals. The 
sections begin with the land. Then a section on “Ancient Peoples” is 
followed by a collection on “Historical Ecologies.” Here the editors’ 
sense of the dynamic forces at work in the driftless becomes clear. The 
region isn’t the same topographically or ecologically as it was 10,000 
years ago, 1,000 years ago, or even 100 years ago. Incessant physical 
forces of running water carrying soil mean that vegetation changes in 
ways visible and invisible. This sense of a “landscape in motion” is 
paralleled in the ordering and composition of sections; topics and ex-
cerpts are not strictly chronological or artificially thematic. “Historical 
Ecologies” is followed by “Native Voices” and then by “Explorations,” 
a section that opens with a mid–twentieth-century poem about cross-
ing the Mississippi in a rapidly moving car and closes with a personal 
history essay on gathering moss at the turn of the twenty-first century 
and a poetic meditation/reflection on fishing. The sections pick up 
with “Early Economies,” “Settler Stories,” and “Farming Lives” before 
turning to “Waterways” and “Conserving Lands.” Readers should be 
creative in exploring the book, forming their own orders and following 
their own interests across the range of subjects and titles.  
 The sections Meine and Keeley develop may frustrate scholars 
and academic experts in these fields of study. “Settler colonialism” is a 
central theoretical critique in the academy these days, and the selections 
of readings don’t really respond to that critique, although a college 
course, for example, might use them as texts for analysis. The discus-
sion of acquisition and economic ordering of the land through survey, 
treated here as a rather painless process, might usefully be brought 
into discussion with other texts to explore the topic more deeply. 
 The readings demonstrate how the various colonial enterprises of 
the French, Spanish, and British, not to mention the American, all 
played out here. The driftless may have been out of the way of the 
dominant narratives of cross-country exploration, railroad-based ex-
pansion, and urban growth, but nevertheless events here were central 
to broader reaches. Often overlooked, for example, is the conservation 
history of the region, with soil conservation by watershed discussed 
here. Another story, perhaps in a subsequent volume, would include 
the establishment of the Upper Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Refuge 
by Will Dilg and the Izaak Walton League. 
 A place-based approach like this, so long out of fashion in aca-
demic scholarship, offers a chance to learn a little about many things 
that would be found in different departments or even colleges in a uni-
versity. Native people, ecology, history, hydrology—all are contained 
192      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
here; sometimes, as in excerpted work by Robin Wall Kimmerer, several 
strands come together in one piece.  
 The book is valuable simply for the lovely writing and illustrations 
it has gathered. But it is also testimony to impressive erudition and the 
result of a bold vision. Other editors would have sorted differently, 
would have perhaps made more clear why “Ancient Peoples” has so 
much writing by recent European settlers, but it’s a good discussion to 
have and exemplary of how other place-based writers might want to 
think about the layering in their landscapes. 
 
 
Locale and Universe: The Shared Story of the Heartland’s Lucas County, 
Iowa, and the American Nation, 1846–2012, by Franklin D. Mitchell. Self-
published, 2016. 480 pp. Maps, illustrations, table, notes, bibliograph-
ical essay. $32.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Kimberly K. Porter, a native of Poweshiek County, Iowa, is pro-
fessor of history at the University of North Dakota. Her work has focused 
on local, rural, and agricultural history and oral history. She is working 
on a biography of Iowan Henry Field. 
Self-published books are often poorly received: the editing is usually 
poor, the argument flimsy, the purpose vague. . . . That can be said of 
some works I’ve been called upon to review or have stumbled upon in 
research endeavors, but it’s not entirely true of Franklin D. Mitchell’s 
history of Lucas County, Iowa. 
 Mitchell, emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern 
California, is trained in the ways of academic research and writing, 
which shows throughout the text. He has also published previously, 
most notably Harry S. Truman and the News Media: Contentious Relations 
and Belated Respect (1998). 
  Mitchell’s goal in undertaking Locale and Universe is unstated at 
the onset, but as his work comes to a close, he records his purpose, 
using the third person: “A historian, native of the county but a non-
resident for many years, became a resident once again in the new cen-
tury’s first decade to take the retrospective measure of a people and a 
place in time. He recalled in his mind the county’s unsung citizens and 
its illustrious sons and daughters. They were the pioneers who settled 
the land and established homes, schools, churches, farms, trades, and 
professions, followed by railroad workers, coal miners and men and 
workers in numerous varied enterprises and callings” (464). Some of 
the county’s residents had been “gentle and wise and a few mean and 
cruel,” but “the historian” felt the need to tell their tale, relating it to 
the American experience as a whole. 


The Driftless Reader

Review of "The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early-Twentieth-Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880-1940" edited by Jon K. Lauc

Johanningsmeier, Charles

Book Reviews and Notices      211 
Nationalism took two very different paths in these brothers’ lives. 
Their stories connect in interesting ways—at times directly when pro-
ceeds from concerts helped finance the militias. The conflict between 
Norway and Sweden over their separation—while very tense at times— 
manifested itself in conflict between these two immigrant communities 
in the United States. One example included here is of the pointed re-
moval of a Swedish song from a concert program. These are interesting 
details that reflect the complexity of immigrant communities’ relation-
ships to their home countries and to each other. The shift in focus—
from success in the United States to the larger context of Norwegian 
identity—is interesting and refreshing; often the immigrant success 
story seems to leave the homeland behind. Being reminded of the con-
tinuing connections between immigrant communities and the politics 
of the homeland is an important part of this text.  
 For those interested in the place of immigration history in the de-
velopment of Iowa, this will be an invaluable contribution. Oleson’s 
life had a lasting impact on Fort Dodge. The author provides detailed 
historical evidence about his life and contributions, including extensive 
accounts of his business dealings, names of his associates, details of 
the programs of each choir concert, and each trip he took. This level of 
detail and the inclusion of all the archival research will be invaluable 
to others researching related topics. The text includes far less interpre-
tation of these details; the connections between topics are not always 
present but are left for the reader to put together. The context and sig-
nificance are not clearly established, and the text would have benefited 
from a stronger narrative thread. I appreciated the detailed treatment 
of the history of Fort Dodge and Oleson’s impact on the male choir 
movement; on the historically important context of nationalism and 
immigrant identity and on the interesting ways communities retained 
links to their homeland, I would have liked to read more.  
 
 
The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early-Twentieth-Century 
Midwestern Regionalism, 1880–1940, edited by Jon K. Lauck. Rediscov-
ering the American Midwest Series. Hastings, NE: Hastings College 
Press, 2017. xv, 287 pp. Illustrations, notes. $24.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Charles Johanningsmeier is professor of English at the University 
of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of numerous works of scholarship 
about regionalist authors of fiction, with a special interest in Willa Cather. 
Editor Jon K. Lauck has, during the past decade, served as a prolific 
booster of midwestern studies. The present volume is a collection of 16 
essays that deal with various elements of the region’s history during a 
212      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
period defined here as “The Midwestern Moment,” when the Midwest 
appeared poised to serve as a shining example of the best of America 
and thus lead the nation into the future. 
 Taken together, these essays do valuable work in the project of 
documenting important aspects of midwestern life from this era. Many 
bring forth the region’s previously well-known, and now much lesser-
known, voices (many with strong connections to Iowa) for new gener-
ations to consider. Figures receiving detailed attention include fiction 
authors Ruth Suckow, Booth Tarkington, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Jay G. 
Sigmund, Frazier Hunt, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Edna 
Ferber, as well as syndicated humor poet Walt Mason, painter Harvey 
Dunn, radio personality Henry Field, and social activist Jane Addams. 
The Society of Midland Authors, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, 
and the Catholic agrarian movement of the 1930s also are the subjects 
of separate chapters. 
 Some of the contributions, unfortunately, do not contribute much 
new knowledge to any relatively well-informed reader’s understand-
ing of midwestern culture, since much fuller treatments of these subjects 
(such as book-length biographies) already exist. In addition, too many 
of the essays are almost wholly descriptive, merely recounting infor-
mation rather than subjecting it to rigorous, theoretically informed 
analysis. Almost all of these writers needed to ask harder questions of 
their subjects. For instance, the basic history of the Society of Midland 
Authors, including its goals, has already been fairly well documented; 
of greater value would be an investigation into what, exactly, the society 
actually accomplished. In a number of other instances, coastal elites 
are, as usual, depicted as the villains responsible for the relative lack of 
success achieved by various midwestern artists and cultural organiza-
tions; left unasked, though, is the question of the role midwestern au-
diences and cultural arbiters themselves played in the failure of these 
artists and groups to achieve positive, lasting reputations. 
 The most glaring shortcoming of the collection as a whole, though, 
is its almost total lack of attention to questions involving ethnic and 
racial diversity. Was part of the appeal of Catholic agrarianism during 
the 1930s, for instance, due to any racially tinged rhetoric? Did radio 
personality Henry Field traffic in ethnic humor in order to achieve 
large audiences? Second, of the 16 contributors, only three are women. 
Third, and most important, there is no engagement with the artistic 
achievements of any members of the wide variety of ethnic groups that 
inhabited the region during this period. One would have appreciated 
an essay, for example, looking at a Swedish, Norwegian, Bohemian, or 
German writer or artist, or the role played by the ethnic press in the 
Book Reviews and Notices      213 
Midwest’s culture, both in urban and rural areas. What, too, about 
the many midwestern authors of color? If the Midwest of this era is not 
to be regarded as a region justifiably left behind by the modernizing 
nation but rather as a place where issues relevant to the country’s 
future were being worked out, more scholarship must be carried out 
about the conflicts and alliances among its various cultural groups. 
 Despite these shortcomings, this collection includes some good 
points. For one thing, the endnotes for a good number of the essays 
yield a rich trove of resources worthy of future exploration. A few of 
the essays also either bring to light extremely under-researched topics 
or offer intriguing revisions of previous ways of thinking about them. 
Paul Emory Putz’s essay about Walt Mason’s syndicated poetry is one 
highlight, for he astutely shows how Mason’s poetry skillfully negoti-
ated the boundaries of “high” and “middlebrow” culture. I was also 
fascinated by Kimberly K. Porter’s article about radio station owner 
and on-air personality Henry Field, an Iowan I had never heard of. 
Allan Carlson’s piece about “Midwestern Catholicism and the Last 
Agrarian Crusade” brings to light an influential, yet little-known, 
social movement and makes interesting connections to the Nashville 
Agrarians responsible for the similarly antimodernist manifesto I’ll 
Take My Stand (1930). Jon K. Lauck himself provides a provocative 
revisionist reading of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Sin-
clair Lewis’s Main Street, contending that neither one is actually the 
type of wholehearted critique of small-town midwestern life it has 
been made out to be.  
 This volume makes a number of valuable contributions to the on-
going project of making today’s readers more aware of the cultural 
achievements of midwesterners in the past. Most important, its essays 
both draw attention to a number of lesser-known elements of mid-
western culture that deserve to be examined in greater detail and indi-
cate the type of scholarship that needs to be carried out on them.  
 
 
Glenn Miller Declassified, by Dennis M. Spragg. Lincoln: Potomac Books, 
an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xvii, 386 pp. 
Tables, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Paige Lush is director of bands and instructor of music at 
McHenry County College. Her doctoral dissertation was “Music and 
Identity in Circuit Chautauqua, 1904–1932.” 
There is perhaps no more cinematic story in the history of American 
music than that of Glenn Miller’s disappearance over the English 
Channel on December 15, 1944. The mystery surrounding Miller’s dis-


The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early-Twentieth-Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880-1940

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 1 Winter 2018

Putz, Paul Emory

Building a City on a Hill: Evangelical Protestant Men and Moral Reform under the Des Moines Plan, 1907–1916

Review of: "The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland," by Holly Folk

Juhnke, Eric

94      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland, 
by Holly Folk. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 
xii, 351 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Eric Juhnke is professor of history at Briar Cliff University. He is 
the author of Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Nor-
man Baker, and Harry Hoxsey (2002). 
Iowa holds a special place in medical history as the wellspring of the 
chiropractic movement. In the late nineteenth century, D. D. Palmer, 
the self-proclaimed “fountainhead” of chiropractic, introduced a new 
medical philosophy as well as its premier training facility in Davenport, 
Iowa. In The Religion of Chiropractic, Holly Folk takes on D. D. Palmer 
and his son B. J. as well as the ways they and other chiropractors per-
ceived and publicized their field. Folk contends that D. D.’s “discovery” 
of chiropractic as well as its early success must be seen within the con-
text of the late nineteenth century, “in which science, religion, and po-
litical sentiment . . . fused together” in a vitalist outlook of “Body, Mind 
and Spirit” (2, 17). As medicine became less individualistic and more 
institutionalized, alternative medicine, Folk argues, served as a “form 
of cultural resistance” for those struggling to come to grips with post-
industrial society. The autodidactic Palmers’ commingling of metaphysics 
and populist rhetoric with health care resonated because it echoed es-
tablished thinking. It also limited the boundaries of chiropractic’s appeal.  
 The Palmers play a starring role in Folk’s book. Although D. D.’s 
first chiropractic treatment allegedly cured a patient of deafness, he was 
slow to feature spinal adjustments, a core feature of the “straight” chiro-
practic theory later taught at the Palmer school. In fact, D. D.’s medical 
theories shifted markedly over the years. The one constant for the free-
thinking D. D. was his belief in a “divine force connecting all reality” 
that fused health care with religion. Like his father, B. J. also combined 
metaphysics and chiropractic, claiming that the spinal cord served as a 
vibratory “cable transmitter” of life force or God (233). B. J. navigated 
the Davenport school through several schisms with rival chiropractors, 
including his own father, and developed a “chiropractic empire” through 
aggressive salesmanship and shameless self-promotion (193). Folk argues 
that B. J. made chiropractic protest against organized medicine “fun” 
with populist crusades, such as encouraging state-sanctioned chiroprac-
tors to “go to jail for the cause” (196). Such anti-establishment rhetoric 
never penetrated the mainstream, although it did align chiropractic with 
other oppositional social stances, including racist and nativist movements.  
 Folk moves beyond the Palmers to chart the evolution of chiropractic. 
Thirty thousand strong in the 1930s, chiropractors’ numbers dwindled 
in the 1940s and 1950s only to rebound again in the 1970s and 1980s as 
Book Reviews and Notices      95 
the public lost faith in various institutions, including established medicine. 
In 1987 the AMA lost an antitrust suit that ended their longstanding 
campaign against chiropractic. Victims of their own success, chiroprac-
tors have struggled in recent decades to compete against holistic and 
allopathic practitioners who “learned from the chiropractic story” and 
incorporated touch-based therapy and even spinal manipulation (256). 
Folk admits that chiropractic has a “poor track record for healing 
structural damage to the spine” and may best be viewed as “condition 
management” (254). Although chiropractic has modernized and pro-
fessionalized in many respects, Folk shows that it remains connected to 
its spiritual and populist past. For example, contemporary chiropractors 
“form a sizeable contingent” of the right-wing “Tea Party, Sovereignty, 
and Tax protest movements” (263). The Palmers’ embrace of metaphysics, 
although often shielded from the patient, also persists among many 
chiropractors today.  
 Folk has done her research, scouring popular health and religious 
literature from the late nineteenth century as well as the special collec-
tions at the Palmer School of Chiropractic. Her coverage of chiropractors’ 
metaphysical views makes for fascinating reading, although including 
the outlook of patients would have added greater depth. The Religion of 
Chiropractic was clearly a personal endeavor for Folk, a self-identified 
religionist who shares “lifestyle habits associated with alternative 
health movements” (8). Despite frequent editorializing, Folk skirts crit-
icism of the Palmers’ controversial beliefs, including their rejection of 
vaccinations and the germ theory and B. J.’s embrace of gadget quackery. 
Folk also dismisses D. D.’s theoretical vacillations as only “unsettling if 
one prefers consistent thinking” as well as B. J.’s plagiarism as “com-
mon” within “populist intellectual writing” (89, 210). Folk does, how-
ever, critique the Palmers’ personalities if not always their beliefs. She 
admits that “there is no way to hide” their “strangeness and remain 
intellectually honest” (52). Both were eccentric—particularly B. J., who 
collected phallic relics, housed alligators in his basement, and iconized 
himself as a Greek god on cigar boxes. Each was so “selfish, dishonest,” 
and “provocative with people,” concludes Folk, that “it is hard to de-
cide which of the two . . . was worse” (235). In the final analysis, The 
Religion of Chiropractic helps demystify chiropractic medicine by placing 
the Palmers and their movement within a broader historical context. 
Those interested in the history of alternative medicine as well as chiro-
practic’s fascinating founders will appreciate Folk’s work. 
 
 


The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 4 Fall 2018

Review of: "The Latina/o Midwest Reader" edited by Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, and Claire F. Fo

Valdes, Dionicio

446      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The Latina/o Midwest Reader, edited by Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago 
Vaquera-Vásquez, and Claire F. Fox. Latinos in Chicago and the Mid-
west. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xii, 332 
pp. Illustrations, chart, tables, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. 
$28.00 paperback.  
Reviewer Dionicio Valdés is professor emeritus of history at Michigan State 
University. He is the author of Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern 
Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century (2000) and Al Norte: Agricul-
tural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917–1970 (1991). 
The Latina/o Midwest Reader is an interdisciplinary anthology of 17 essays, 
plus an introduction and afterword, that examines various aspects of the 
experience of an increasingly diverse and rapidly growing population 
in the region between the Rocky and Allegheny Mountains. It is based 
on papers initially presented at a symposium at the University of Iowa 
in 2013. The authors examine a range of topics, most of them specific 
midwestern case studies, five of which focus on Iowa. The essays are 
grouped into five sections, examining geography and place, history and 
workers, education, performance, and non-electoral political activism. 
The authors represent diverse disciplinary approaches and a range of 
viewpoints.  
 The editors emphasize that one aim of the volume is “to challenge 
the notion that Latinas/os are newcomers to the Midwest” (2). That chal-
lenge extends, at least implicitly, to intensifying negative stereotypes in 
the national political arena, including claims that Latinas/os have dif-
ferent values, pose a threat to older residents and to national unity, and 
therefore do not belong. Each essay challenges one or more of the stereo-
types in distinct ways.  
 The essays in part one, “The Browning of the Midwest,” emphasize 
facets of the expansion and intensification of Latina/o cultural geogra-
phy, as a population that first spread from Texas and Mexico to a hand-
ful of locations starting more than a century ago, primarily in search of 
short-term, temporary work, over time became an increasingly rooted 
population that has spread across the region, even living in small towns 
on the prairies. A case study based on a bicycling research trip chal-
lenges the myth that Latinas/os have different values or pose a threat, 
providing cases consistent with the current neoliberal trope that demon-
strate successful entrepreneurs and elected political representatives. 
Two subsequent essays examine the longstanding link between Texas 
and the Midwest and a more recent one between Lorraine, Illinois, and 
Jiménez, Nuevo León, in which workers participate in a labor migration 
circuit linked to the broomcorn industry.  
Book Reviews and Notices      447 
 Two of the essays in part two, on history and labor, focus on Chicago. 
The first examines the bleak life of Mexican immigrant workers in the 
South Chicago steel mills during the generation following their first arri-
val at the start of World War I; the second focuses on Mexican and Puerto 
Rican workers who arrived during and after World War II. The section 
ends with a fine short study of how workers recruited to Perry, Iowa, in-
itially as meatpackers, challenge racism and marginalization, sometimes 
by living “below the radar” or living in “parallel worlds,” at other times 
by asserting their own humanity more forcefully by speaking Spanish 
and playing their favorite music with Spanish lyrics at high volume.  
 Three articles on education in part three demonstrate how Latinas/ 
os challenge inaccurate negative stereotypes. Like all immigrant groups 
to the United States, they adopt the dominant idiom more rapidly than 
do immigrants to any other nation in the world. Furthermore, they learn 
the language most rapidly when they simultaneously study and learn 
Spanish not simply as a transition to English but in its own right, which 
simultaneously results in learning other materials more effectively. An-
other article demonstrates that immigrant parents care deeply about how 
their children fare in school but are stymied by institutional ignorance. 
A final article confirms that disciplinary Latina/o Studies will thrive in 
academia only with ongoing pressure from students and the community.  
 Essays in part four, on performance, examine the work of artist Ana 
Mendieta in Iowa, the defiant artistry of Chicago drag Queen Ketty 
Teanga, and the formation of El Museo del Norte in Detroit.  
 Finally, in part five, on movement politics, the authors examine 
civil rights struggles in the Mennonite Church; the Chicago Young 
Lords Organization; Iowa-based support for the late-1960s United Farm 
Workers grape boycott; Latina leadership in Wisconsin and Iowa, and 
the contemporary activism and practices of the Chicago-based Immi-
gration Youth Justice League.  
 With its range of topics, interdisciplinary focus, and diverse meth-
odology, the volume is directed toward interested readers and intro-
ductory college courses in ethnic and Latina/o studies. Many of the case 
studies are well researched and insightful, particularly in documenting 
changes in the past generation. However, the quality is uneven, and the 
introductory essay detracts from the overall work, suffering from care-
less writing and a weak grasp of the history that ties the essays together. 
The editors’ assertion that “ethnic Mexicans began arriving in the re-
gion to work in the sugar beet industry as early as the 1880s” is flawed. 
Without Mexicans, the industry became established in the region only 
in the 1890s and first two decades of the twentieth century, and recruit-
448      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
ment of Mexicans began only after company experiments to employ lo-
cal labor failed. In fact, ethnic Mexicans entered the region in significant 
numbers prior to the 1880s. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, 
Mexican vaqueros from Texas worked the cattle drives from Texas to 
Kansas during the industrial boom of the era. Before that, starting in 
1821 with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, Mexican teamsters and traders 
delivered goods between Santa Fe and St. Louis. Still earlier, during the 
United States War of Independence in the 1770s and 1780s, ethnic Mexican 
soldiers representing the Spanish Crown occupied several locations in 
the region. Also in the late eighteenth century, residents of the Louisiana 
Territory under Spanish control, ethnic Mexicans, received land grants 
and established residences in the region. Enterprising and imaginative 
archaeological and anthropological research will elaborate and enhance 
our knowledge of these and earlier links between the ancestors of Lati-
nas/os and the region currently referred to as the Midwest.  
 Regarding the issue of identity, some of the authors problematize 
the terms Latino, Latina, and Latina/o but inexplicably neglect the very 
important popular term Latinx, which for many reasons has gained 
widespread acceptance and usage in the twenty-first century.  
 
 
Somos Latinas: Voices of Wisconsin Latina Activists, by Andrea-Teresa 
Arenas and Eloisa Gómez. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 
2018. xx, 290 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $24.95 
paperback. 
Reviewer Janet Weaver is assistant curator at the Iowa Women’s Archives, 
University of Iowa Libraries. She is the author of “Barrio Women: Commu-
nity and Coalition in the Heartland” in Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Or-
ganizations, and Feminism, 1945–1985, edited by Kathleen A. Laughlin and 
Jacqueline L. Castledine (2011). 
Coauthored by Andrea-Teresa Arenas and Eloisa Gómez, Somos Latinas 
brings to light the powerful life stories of 25 Wisconsin Latina activists 
to underscore the significance of grassroots community activism in 
making change from the 1950s to the present. Through the lens of these 
narrators, readers gain insight into the value of a “woman-centered” 
community engagement and the discipline and persistence of these 
madres, whose activism often centered on building community and 
contributing to the good of the whole in the places where they lived. 
It is entirely fitting that the foreword to Somos Latinas is written by 
renowned Chicana civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, whose lifelong 
advocacy on behalf of farmworkers and women began with her first-
hand experience in community organizing through the Community 
Service Organization (CSO) in California.  


The Latina/o Midwest Reader

Review of: "Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working Class Studies" edited by Dennis Deslipp

Zieren, Gregory R.

328      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
dead cover post-1945 events that are often neglected. The biographical 
portion is an extraordinary effort to tell the stories of the men and 
women who served in uniform. For some there is only a name and res-
idence; for others there is considerable information on both civilian and 
military life, with quotations from letters or interviews. This section will 
appeal primarily to genealogists. 
 
 
Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working-Class Studies, edited by Dennis 
Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, and John W. McKerley. Urbana and Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 2016. The Working Class in American 
History Series. x, 287 pp. Photograph, notes, index. $95.00 hardcover, 
$28.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Gregory R. Zieren, a former interviewer with the Iowa Labor His-
tory Oral Project, is professor of history at Austin Peay State University. 
His research and writing have focused on Gilded Age economic and labor 
history. 
Civic Labors is a collection of nearly two dozen articles and introductory 
essays written mainly by historians of the American working class. In 
the University of Illinois Press, the editors of the collection found the 
ideal publisher because the work fits perfectly in its Working Class in 
American History Series. No other major university press has made as 
enduring a commitment to labor and working-class history. As of last 
year, the series encompassed 125 titles with publication dates starting 
in the 1970s and continuing to today. Civic Labors belongs in the group 
because so many of its contributors wrote monographs for the series; 
the contributors’ work, in turn, inspired others through their writing, 
teaching, and activism in labor, civil rights, and women’s rights. 
 One clear attraction of Civic Labors for Iowa readers is its regional 
focus. Many of the contributors have careers based in midwestern uni-
versities, especially in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. This is 
significant because involvement in civic labor means studying the past 
as historians while remaining engaged in the present locally in fights for 
labor representation and other social justice struggles. Peter Rachleff, for 
instance, taught at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and be-
came well known in labor circles for his support for striking packing-
house workers at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota; Ralph Schar-
nau, from the University of Dubuque, devoted a career to labor and Iowa 
history and then became an activist defending faculty rights at the uni-
versity from new management determined to make faculty submissive 
to their restrictive policies. H. Shelton Stromquist at the University of 
Iowa, James Barrett at the University of Illinois, and Stephen Meyer at 
Book Reviews and Notices       329 
the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee all crossed the lines between 
historians studying the past and activists engaged in fights for represen-
tation and fairness in the present. The pre-eminent scholar in the collec-
tion is the late David Montgomery, Farnam Professor of History at Yale 
University and doctoral dissertation supervisor for several of the schol-
ars represented in Civic Labors. The origins of the book can be traced to a 
scholarly celebration for Shel Stromquist in 2011 held on the campus of 
the University of Iowa. Montgomery was a keynote speaker, a scholar 
held in virtually universal esteem by labor and working-class historians 
generally. The event was one of the last academic events before his 
death later that same year. Perhaps no labor historian in the post–World 
War II era contributed as much to the field as Montgomery. 
 One topic that unites labor and community activists with academi-
cally trained scholars is oral history. Five essays in the collection relate 
in some fashion to the promise and perils of oral history, from the am-
bitious attempt to find voices for a 1911 dockers’ strike in Liverpool, 
England, to the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Iowa Labor History 
Oral Project. In the late 1970s that venture started collecting oral his-
tories from veterans of Iowa’s labor movement; it continues today to 
record interviews and manage a collection of about 1,200 subjects.  
 The wide range of topics might suggest a lack of coherence or a 
mere collection of unrelated essays. But the editors of Civic Labors tried 
to bring intellectual consistency to the topics at hand. For the most part 
the essayists are senior, experienced historians who can look back on 
careers devoted to the causes of labor, the working class, and the quest 
for social justice for ordinary Americans. They are scholars and teachers 
and writers, but they have devoted a good portion of their working lives 
to the quest to help and understand others outside academia by using 
their time, talent, and skills for that broader agenda. There are no out-
spoken conservatives among the writers of Civic Labors. Critics, there-
fore, might point to the extracurricular work of these scholars and their 
left-oriented publications and declare that liberal bias in higher educa-
tion is alive and well. But criticism like that fails to consider the most 
important characteristics of scholar activism. The writers in question in 
this book have devoted substantial effort to organizing, documenting, 
encouraging, and sustaining movements to help their fellow citizens 
improve their lives. Many of the essays testify to that level of engage-
ment. Rather than evidence of bias, another interpretation would assert 
that their work is evidence of commitment, a moral quest, and a belief 
in a higher standard.  
 The final essay in the collection is David Montgomery’s. He cele-
brates the achievements of the activists and wonders where the next 
330      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
generation will apply its energies. Some of the essays in Civic Labors 
point to ongoing struggles for fair treatment and a decent living standard. 
Iowa is no longer the industrial powerhouse it once was in coal mining, 
meatpacking, and agricultural implement manufacturing. The essays in 
this collection point to future battles in new arenas for workers of all 
sorts and the scholar activists who will continue the struggle, much as 
those represented in this fine collection have done. 
 
 
The Capital Times: A Proudly Radical Newspaper’s Century-Long Fight for 
Justice and for Peace, by Dave Zweifel and John Nichols. Madison: Wis-
consin Historical Society Press, 2017. xv, 319 pp. Illustrations, appen-
dixes, note on sources, index. $25.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Frank Durham is associate professor of journalism in the Univer-
sity of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research 
interests include journalism history and media framing analysis. 
Full of clear, engaging writing and photos depicting a century of pro-
gressive activism by the Capitol Times, this history of the Madison (Wis-
consin) daily afternoon newspaper recalls a time when there were gi-
ants on the Left in America. Much more than nostalgia, however, the 
essays in this volume offer a meaningful history of the newspaper’s 
glory days. This well-written account by the newspaper’s longtime for-
mer editor Dave Zweifel and current associate editor John Nichols cel-
ebrates the iconic media outlet’s career as a local newspaper with a na-
tional voice and, especially, a progressive voice. As the authors make 
clear, one need not look further than the 2011 occupation of the state 
capitol by anti–Scott Walker protesters to see that liberal legacy alive 
and kicking in Madison today.  
 In the book’s introduction, Zweifel and Nichols describe the “Cap 
Times” as a newspaper with a “soul.” Then they proceed to show it. By 
using the vast resources of the Wisconsin State Historical Society and 
their own files, the authors have researched a detailed narrative that I 
enjoyed for its “energetic morality.” If that term seems odd, the look in 
the eye of progressives, both early and late, shown in the book’s dozens 
of documentary photographs will make it clear. At that core level, the 
authors succeed in bringing to life the time when William T. Evjue could 
define progressivism in his editorials and take it to the ballot box, too. 
 Offering detailed accounts of aggressive reporting and pointed edi-
torializing, the authors describe the positions to which Evjue staked the 
Times, detailing one signal liberal moment after another, both in their en-
gaging narrative and through photos. Evjue left the conservative Madison 
Wisconsin State Journal in 1917 to oppose war profiteers and the U.S. entry 


Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working Class Studies

Review of "The Great Medicine Roas: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 3, 1850-1855" edited by Michael L. Tat

Murphy, J.T.

306      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
sonian era influenced Wisconsin’s constitution-writing process. The 
initial document the convention produced showcased broad social and 
political rights, including suffrage, homestead exemptions, and wom-
en’s rights. Ranney supports his claim that the Midwest led the march 
toward equal rights, even though the convention did not ratify all of 
those rights at once.  
 The Midwest, and Wisconsin in particular, continued this march. 
Wisconsin made the bold move to challenge the federal Congress’s 
authority by declaring the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. After 
the abolition of slavery, Wisconsin enforced antisegregation laws. 
Throughout the Progressive Era, the Midwest produced leaders like 
Robert M. Lafollette, who led the Progressive movement.  
 Ranney also shows how conservative as well as liberal ideas dis-
play the midwestern influence on national legal culture. Wisconsin falls 
on the conservative side of the issue of school vouchers, but remains on 
the forefront of shaping legal history. Through his many examples 
throughout the book, Ranney illustrates that the politics of the issue mat-
ters less than the idea of individual freedom. 
 Ranney has made a valuable contribution to the historiography of 
American legal history. Throughout the book, he uses sound logic and 
strongly supports his claims. His research brings to light many state 
laws and cases that lift the ideas discussed in the book out of obscurity. 
Readers will come away with a new appreciation for state legal systems 
and their history. Historians usually show how legal trends stem from 
the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal Congress; Ranney flips this no-
tion and shows how states, particularly those in the Midwest, have 
pushed legal trends. 
 I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys legal or state history. 
Ranney points to a variety of interesting cases and laws that stimulate 
thinking and offer a fresh look at legal trends. The book also stimulates 
pride in the Midwest. Normally we think of the coasts as driving trends, 
but here we see the Midwest at the forefront and having a lasting im-
pact on the entire nation.  
  
 
The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon 
Trails, Part 3, 1850–1855, edited by Michael L. Tate. American Trails 
Series 24. Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark Co. , an imprint of the Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 312 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $45.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South 
Bend. His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the 
Book Reviews and Notices       307 
Oregon Trail, and the military history of the nineteenth-century U.S. West, 
among other topics. 
“The long looked for day arrived and a great many of our friends came 
to see us and help us yoke our oxen,” 20-year-old John Lawrence John-
son noted in his diary on April 1, 1851. “There was much weeping at 
leave taking. I looked out and saw our friends from town passing, so 
with whip in hand I started” (70). Johnson’s father, the Reverend Neill 
Johnson, had been asked to establish a Presbyterian church in Oregon’s 
Willamette River valley, so the family of 12 gathered their belongings 
into three wagons and left Mount Pleasant, Iowa, for the journey west. 
As the younger Johnson walked past their locust tree, he put some seed 
pods into his pocket and planted them six months later at their new 
home. On the same day in 1852, Mary Jane Long’s family crossed the 
Missouri River at Council Bluffs, vacating their Iowa farm to resettle in 
Oregon. They were among an estimated 70,000 migrants, the largest 
number that traveled on the overland trails.  
 Between 1850 and 1855, the period covered in this third of a four-
volume series edited by Michael L. Tate (assisted by Kerin Tate, Will 
Bagley, and Richard Rieck), the increased traffic on the trail seemed end-
less to Indian observers. They soon called it the Great Medicine Road, 
and the letters, diaries, and reminiscences in this edition attest to that 
impression. In mid-May 1853 John H. B. Neill reported that 2,000 wag-
ons were already ahead of their train, and on June 1 of that same year, 
Helen Marnie Stewart recorded in her diary, “We can see emigrants now 
as far as we can see” (180). As a consequence, crowded conditions made 
finding grass and firewood difficult, but well-worn trails were easy to 
follow, numerous cutoffs had been established, ferries and bridges aided 
river crossings, and a military presence offered some protection. But 
along with the daily tedium, emigrants continued to experience risk. 
Cholera took its toll in 1852 and again in 1855, leaving many graves in 
its wake. “We had to make a rough box from planks taken out of the 
wagons,” remembered Long following the death of her uncle, “and we 
wrapped his body in bed clothes and buried him” (151). Within days, 
two of his children died as well. During the early trail years, Indians 
were rarely a threat, although emigrants imagined otherwise, but by 
1855 natives along the road, particularly the Lakota, resented the tres-
passers and demanded tribute. The accounts here describe a range of 
negotiations and confrontations with Indians; in the telling, pioneers re-
minded themselves (and their readers) of what an adventure it was.  
 Once again, the editors have provided documents that will aid 
researchers and delight anyone interested in the lives of overland pio-
neers. This volume includes four detailed maps showing the many trails 
308      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
and cutoffs, photographs and illustrations, a lengthy bibliography, and 
explanatory introductions and footnotes. It is an impressive effort and, 
like the earlier volumes produced in this series, an important addition 
to trail studies.  
 
  
Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America, 
by Shari Rabin. North American Religions Series. New York: New York 
University Press, 2017. viii, 193 pp. Notes, index. $37.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Hasia R. Diner is professor of history and of Hebrew and Judaic 
Studies at New York University (NYU), and she directs NYU’s Center for 
American Jewish History. Her books include The Jews of the United States, 
1654 to 2000 (2006) and Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in 
America from Colonial Times to the Present (2002). 
In this compact but geographically far-ranging book Shari Rabin set out 
to accomplish three scholarly ends, all of which expand understanding 
of American and American Jewish history. Jews on the Frontier, a straight-
forward title, looks at the experiences of the Jews who immigrated to 
the United States in the nineteenth century, during the decades flanking 
the Civil War, and who spread out beyond the Appalachian Mountains, 
crossed the Mississippi River, and penetrated in all directions, going to 
nearly every state and territory in the lands that opened up for the 
United States during its continental conquest. Most arrived as young 
men who took up the occupation of on-the-road peddlers and then 
graduated from peddling to entrepreneurship. Most did reasonably 
well economically, while a few succeeded spectacularly. As white men, 
they encountered no legal obstacles as they scouted out the most attrac-
tive places for business in this vast terrain.  
 Rabin’s goals grew out of this historical reality about Jewish migra-
tion and mobility. In the places they went, they found no laws limiting 
them and no pre-existing Jewish institutional infrastructure. They came 
to these places as the first Jews, and whatever they might want of a Jew-
ish life they had to do for themselves. 
 As a book of religious history, Jews on the Frontier considers religion 
not as a normative matter. Rather it places it in the realm of lived expe-
rience. Religion, Rabin shows as she charts physical movement and its 
impact on European immigrant Jews in the five decades from the 1820s 
to the 1870s, functioned as something they lived with. They did so by 
choice and not because they had to. How they engaged with religion 
did not rest exclusively with the dictates of rabbis or with the inherited 
laws of the past. Not that clergy did not show up on the frontier or that 


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