Global Heartland is a side project that may someday become a book. Currently I teach history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I’ve noticed that southern Californians are oddly fond of the label “heartland.” Naturally, I’m suspicious. Before moving west I worked for the University of Illinois’s Labor Education Program. From 2000-2005 I was the director of the Newberry Library’s Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History where I co-curated (with Peter Alter) the exhibit “Outspoken: Chicago’s Free Speech Tradition”. My book “Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930” (University of Illinois Press, 2003) is pretty good. Being naturally indecisive, I have another blog at “Bughouse Square”.
