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"Colonizing the West"
Immigrant Towns on the Northern Plains, 1870-1920
Abstract
European and native-born settlers on the Plains created a network of communities anchored in religion and ethnicity but oriented toward market agriculture. Migration to the Plains spanned a continuum in which group settlement for economic and religious reasons played a paradigmatic role for native-born and immigrant settlers alike. In the early decades of community development, ethnic, religious, and economic differences were mediated by common reliance on the corporate structures of an industrializing society as manifest in Plains railroads. Small towns played a crucial and under-researched role as sites for mediation between organic and corporate structures as well as between rural and urban society. This study therefore uses multidisciplinary techniques to analyze how gesellschaft structures laid the framework for and continually transformed the gemeinschaft world of Plains country towns. Geography revealed networks of ethnic, religious, and economic association. Church and school finance, theology, and curriculum connected local communities to state and national bodies. Community festivals and Main Street marketing brought disparate groups together even as they displayed differing levels of economic and civic integration. Plains country towns, as sites of multiple migrations and lasting ethnic enclaves, provide an ideal location to study how traditional concepts of ethnic difference interacted with a modern corporate economy and expansive nation-state.
Table of Contents
- Strength of Themselves: Settlers and Colonists on the Northern Plains
- Going to Church: Ethnicity, Religion, and Status in Small-Town Society
- From One-Room School houses to Brick High Schools: The Geography of Public Education
- Celebrating Small Towns: Public and Private Festivals, 1890-1910
- Between Farmers and City Slickers: Lifestyles of the Small-town Merchant
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