American Heartland

This collection offers a multifaceted exploration of World War One and its aftermath in the northern American Heartland, a region often overlooked in wartime histories. The chapters feature archival and newspaper documentation and visual imagery from this era. The first section, “Heartland Histories,” explores experiences of conscription and home front mobilization in the small communities of the heartland, highlighting tensions associated with patriotism, class, ethnicities, and locale. In one chapter, the previously unpublished cartoon art of a USAF POW displays his Midwestern sensibilities. Section Two, “Homefront Propaganda,” examines the cultural networks disseminating national war messages, notably the critical work of local theaters, Four Minute Men, the Allied War Exhibitions, and the local commemorative displays of military relics. Section Three, “Gender in/and War,” highlights aspects often over-shadowed by male experiences of the war itself, including the patriotic mother, androgynous representations in wartime propaganda, and masculine violence following the war. Together, this volume provides rich portraits of the complexities of heartland home front experiences and legacies.

American Heartland flows from the Midwestern childhood of the author who learned the values of loyalty, bravery, and honesty with love for God and country. LTC Peterson's poetry is a unique portrayal of those values, as a substantive down to earth word painting, but with a transcending perspective, yet substantive down to earth painting with words everyone can unequalled by modern poets. His down to earth prose combined with his acumen, wit, and wisdom is comparable to Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac. Like Longfellow he portrays a nostalgic past and like Poe, Roy's mystic moments in Fall Fantasy are seductive. Two sections of humor, however, set him apart as a poet for the ages.

Who will step up to meet the challenge of the next rural crisis? Rural practice presents important yet challenging issues for psychology, especially givenuneven population distribution, high levels of need, limited availability of rural services, and ongoing migration to urban centers. It is critical that mental health professionals andfirst responders in rural areas become aware of recent research, training and approachesto crisis intervention, traumatology, compassion fatigue, disaster mental health, critical incidentstress management, post-traumatic stress and related areas in rural environments.Critical issues facing rural areas include: Physical issues such as land, air, and water resources, cheap food policy, chemicalsand pesticides, animal rights, corruption in food marketing and distribution, and landappropriation for energy development.Quality of life issues such as rural America's declining share of national wealth, problems ofhunger, education, and rural poverty among rural populations of farmers and ranchers.Direct service issues include the need to accommodate a wide variety of mental healthdifficulties, client privacy and boundaries, and practical challenges.Indirect service issues include the greater need for diverse professional activities, collaborativework with professionals having different orientations and beliefs, program developmentand evaluation, and conducting research with few mentors or peer collaborators.Professional training and development issues include lack of specialized relevantcourses and placements.Personal issues include limited opportunities for recreation, culture, and lack of privacy. Doherty's first volume in this new series "Crisis in the American Heartland" explores theseand many other issues.Social Science: Disasters & Disaster Relief For more information please visit www.RMRInstitute.org

Veterans in rural communities face unique challenges, who will step up to help? Beginning with a brief scenario of a more gentle view of rural life, the book moves through learned information about families, children, and our returning National Guard and Reserve civilian military members. Return experiences will necessarily be different in rural and frontier settings than they are in suburban and urban environments. Our rural and frontier areas, especially in Western states with more isolated communities, less developed communication and limited access to medical, psychological and social services remain an important concern. This book helps provide some informed direction in working toward improving these as a general guide for mental health professionals working with Guard and Reserve members and families in rural/frontier settings. An appendix provides an in-depth list of online references for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Specific areas of concern include: Morale, deployment abroad, and stress factors Effects of terrorism on children and families at home Understanding survivor guilt Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and suicide Preventing secondary traumatization Resiliency among refugee populations and military families Adjustment and re-integration following the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Vicarious trauma and its effects on children and adults How rural and remote communities differ from more urban ones following war experiences in readjusting military members Characteristics important in therapists/counselors working with returning military Doherty's second volume in this new series "Crisis in the American Heartland" explores these and many other issues. Each volume available in trade paper, hardcover, and eBook formats. Learn more at www.RMRInstitute.org PSY022040 Psychology: Psychopathology - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder SOC040000 Social Science: Disasters & Disaster Relief HIS027170 Military - Iraq War (2003-)

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

This collection examines Latina/o immigrants and the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Contributors look at outside factors affecting migration, including corporate agriculture, technology, globalization, and government. They also reveal how cultural affinities like religion, strong family ties, farming, and cowboy culture attract these newcomers to the Heartland. Throughout, essayists point to how hostile neoliberal policy reforms have made it difficult for Latin American immigrants to find social and economic stability. Filled with varied and eye-opening perspectives, Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland reveals how identities, economies, and geographies are changing as Latin Americans adjust to their new homes, jobs, and communities. Contributors: Linda Allegro, Tisa M. Anders, Scott Carter, Caitlin Didier, Miranda Cady Hallett, Edmund Hamann, Albert Iaroi, Errol D. Jones, Jane Juffer, László J. Kulcsár, Janelle Reeves, Jennifer F. Reynolds, Sandi Smith-Nonini, and Andrew Grant Wood.

A history of a quintessentially American place--the rural and small town heartland--that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world. When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the D.C. metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe. Struck by the gap between reputation and reality, she determined to get to the bottom of history and myth. The deeper she dug into the making of the modern heartland, the wider her story became as she realized that she'd uncovered an unheralded crossroads of people, commerce, and ideas. But the really interesting thing, Hoganson found, was that over the course of American history, even as the region's connections with the rest of the planet became increasingly dense and intricate, the idea of the rural Midwest as a steadfast heartland became a stronger and more stubbornly immovable myth. In enshrining a symbolic heart, the American people have repressed the kinds of stories that Hoganson tells, of sweeping breadth and depth and soul. In The Heartland, Kristin L. Hoganson drills deep into the center of the country, only to find a global story in the resulting core sample. Deftly navigating the disconnect between history and myth, she tracks both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the land. A provocative and highly original work of historical scholarship, The Heartland speaks volumes about pressing preoccupations, among them identity and community, immigration and trade, and security and global power. And food. To read it is to be inoculated against using the word "heartland" unironically ever again.

This manual provides lenses- geography, religion, politics, culture, economics, history, ethnicity- to better understand the complexity and depth of congregations as social institutions and as the body of Christ within a multi-layered context of life.