Farming the Cutover describes the visions and accomplishments of these settlers from their perspective. People of the cutover managed to forge lives relatively independent of market pressures, and for this they were characterized as backward by outsiders and their part of the state was seen as a hideout for organized crime figures. State and federal planners, county agents, and agriculture professors eventually determined that the cutover could be engineered by professional and academic expertise into a Progressive social model and the lives of its inhabitants improved. By 1940, they had begun to implement public policies that discouraged farming, and they eventually decided that the region should be depopulated and the forests replanted. By exploring the history of an eighteen-county region, Robert Gough illustrates the travails of farming in marginal areas. He juxtaposes the social history of the farmers with the opinions and programs of the experts who sought to improve the region. Significantly, what occurred in the Wisconsin cutover anticipated the sweeping changes that transformed American agriculture after World War II.

"Picturing Minnesota brings together the best of the images taken in Minnesota from the collection of photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration during the depression era and the advent of World War II. Among the photographers represented here are John Vachon, a native of St. Paul, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott. Outstanding as photographic works of art, these pictures are unique in their ability to convey the details of life in Minnesota during those years"--Publisher's description from lensculture.com.

The St. Croix River, the free-flowing boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota, is a federally protected National Scenic Riverway. The area’s first recorded human inhabitants were the Dakota Indians, whose lands were transformed by fur trade empires and the loggers who called it the “river of pine.” A patchwork of farms, cultivated by immigrants from many countries, followed the cutover forests. Today, the St. Croix River Valley is a tourist haven in the land of sky-blue waters and a peaceful escape for residents of the bustling Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan region. North Woods River is a thoughtful biography of the river over the course of more than three hundred years. Eileen McMahon and Theodore Karamanski track the river’s social and environmental transformation as newcomers changed the river basin and, in turn, were changed by it. The history of the St. Croix revealed here offers larger lessons about the future management of beautiful and fragile wild waters.

Travel north from the upper Midwest’s metropolises, and before long you’re “Up North”—a region that’s hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area—and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.