Long neglected by historians, the American Midwest has come to be known as the "Lost Region." But in the last decade a cadre of dedicated scholars has worked to remedy this oversight, launching new associations, conferences, and journals that have given rise to the New Midwestern History. Between Loving and Leaving reveals the depth and breadth of this revived field, showcasing its variety and reach, cultivating new approaches, and opening the way to the extraordinary range of topics embraced by a true history of the Midwest.

The authors, among the most distinguished in the field, take up topics of new, renewed, and longstanding interest. They consider the Midwestern landscape, family farming, and literature and art produced by Midwesterners. Their essays explore matters of ethnicity, race, and gender, highlighting the experiences of, among others, African American Midwesterners, Latinos, Native Americans, and women. And inevitably, in a region that has produced so many activists and movements, they look at peculiarly Midwestern politics.

Working the fertile territory between a deep attachment to the Midwest, with its civic and social institutions and achievements, and a flight from the familiar, the authors capture the vast and varied character of the Midwest as it is experienced, understood, and represented in art and literature—and, finally, in history.