Bookshelf
Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.
Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons, New York Six Consortium project manager.
May 26, 2026
(University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
According to the publisher, this book highlights “the critical role of Midwestern farmers in the creation of the American century,” and that Simons “explores how, after decades of slipping to the margins of an urbanizing economy, these farmers assumed renewed strategic and cultural importance as they produced essential sustenance for overseas troops and food rations for a domestic population.”
Noting Simons’ “focus on farmers and their work rather than the more common attention to food or agricultural commodities,” the publisher adds that “Global Heartland complicates and expands ideas of the farm industry’s role in American history.”
According to one reviewer “Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world. Just as importantly, it shows how the humanitarian and cooperative impulses of agrarian internationalism contended with more nationalist leanings to determine the nature of that heart.”
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Stacey Himmelberger
Editor of Hamilton magazine
