1.
The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly
VOLUME 69 ?? NUMBER 1 ?? JANUARY 1960
Recent Writings on
Midwestern Economic History
By HARRY R. STEVENS*
ACADEMIC HISTORIANS OF MIDWESTERN
ECONOMY have
studied their subject long and
productively, but having estab-
lished at an early date certain approaches to their
material
and forms in which to present it that
were quite satisfactory,
they have continued to make use of them
with surprising
tenacity.1 Soon after they began to
work, in the 1880's, they
developed three major forms: first, the monograph,
article,
or book centered on a specific topic
such as taxation, land
laws, money, or railroads, which could
be easily identified in
the source materials they were
exploring; second, the regional,
state, or local history in which
economic subjects were treated
as fragments interspersed among
political, social, religious,
military, cultural, and biographical
materials; and third, the
general survey of national economic
development and the
survey, nation-wide in geographical
scope, dealing with such
broad economic fields as industry or
transportation, in which
midwestern material appeared without
regional identification
* Harry R. Stevens is associate
professor of history at Ohio University. He is
the author also of a bibliographical
essay on recent writings on midwestern
political history, The Middle West (Washington,
1958).
1 On midwestern economic history of the
frontier periods, see Robert E. Riegel,
"American Frontier Theory," Journal
of World History, III (1956), 356-380;
Gene M. Gressley, "The Turner
Thesis--A Problem in Historiography," Agri-
cultural History, XXXII (1958), 227-249; Norman J. Simler,
"The Safety-
Valve Doctrine Re-Evaluated," ibid.,
250-257; R. Carlyle Buley, The Old North-
west: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840 (Indianapolis, 1950).