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Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul, "Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with both of the authors of a book published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2026 titled Becoming History, Heritage and Sustainability in the American Midwest. And we're not going to be talking about, like everywhere in the American Midwest. We don't have, I don't know, 12 days to cover it. But interestingly, all of these ideas, history, heritage and sustainability are all bound up in this one kind of actually quite tiny place in Illinois, which we're going to be talking about in some detail because there's many different stories going on here, any of which are intriguing, and the fact that they're all in the same place, I think is also really fascinating. So, as I mentioned, the book is written by two authors, Dark Dr. Margaret Farrar and Dr. Adam Cole. And I'm very pleased to have both of them with me on the podcast. Margaret, Adam, thank you so much for joining me.
- [01:05]
C
Thanks for having us, Miranda.
- [01:07]
B
Could we start off, please, by each of you introducing yourselves a little bit and then tell us why you decided to write this book and do it together. Adam, maybe you could start us off.
- [01:16]
A
Sure. My name is Adam Call. I'm a professor of anthropology at Augustana College, which is in Rock Island, Illinois.
- [01:24]
C
And I'm Margaret Farrar. I'm a professor of political science at John Carroll University, which is just outside Cleveland, Ohio.
- [01:31]
A
Yeah, so we're both Midwesterners. We both grew up in the Midwest. And so we're very kind of conscious of the narratives surrounding the idea of the Midwest. And Margaret and I both used to teach together. We were colleagues at Augustana and got kind of intrigued by this local village and its history. And that's we, we started working together on this project about 15 years ago. So it's been quite a long time. Yeah.
- [02:00]
B
Intriguing. Okay, why this project then, and why do it together?
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A
Go ahead, Margaret.
- [02:06]
C
I think one important or interesting thing to know is that this book started as a dinner conversation and we thought it was going to be an article that we could work on for a couple years and then move on with our lives. And both Adam and really interested in sort of tourist narratives and how people who live in tourist facing spaces understand themselves and the place that they're in. But that interest quickly blossomed into much more as we got to know this utopian community and find out more about its history. So we thought that we could get A lot out of bringing our two disciplines together and the tools of our two disciplines together to work on this one single place.
- [02:53]
A
Yeah, we have quite a few overlapping interests that kind of cross over or cross pollinate between our two disciplines, one of which is just like a kind of sense of place. We're both really interested in places and how people construct identities in various places and a number of other kind of areas that are kind of a nice Venn diagram between our two disciplinary perspectives and also methodological perspectives. So kind of brought all that together in a. Yeah. Very interdisciplinary project. So.
- [03:28]
B
And brought it all together to investigate a very specific place. So obviously the two of you have been with Bishop Hill for a very long time. But for those of us who are less familiar, can you give us a brief introduction?
- [03:40]
A
Yeah. It was a village that was founded by a charismatic kind of breakaway Lutheran preacher who actually came to start thinking of himself as the second coming of Christ. So he had amassed a whole number of followings, thousands of followers over in Sweden, and had become quite antagonistic with the official state Lutheran church there. And eventually he and his followers crossed the Atlantic and purchased some land in what was then kind of the frontier in Illinois. And they established a communal society which lasted about a dozen years before it broke up. And one of the reasons it probably eventually broke up is because about four years into the establishment of the colony, this charismatic leader, his name is Eric Johnson, was murdered. So he was. He was killed at the local county courthouse. It a kind of dispute he had with another kind of member of, of the communal society. And they laid him out in the colony church for three days and three nights, expecting him to rise from the dead, but he didn't. So it was kind of disappointing. And then eventually there was all sorts of financial scandals and kind of corruption really. And so between that and the outbreak of the. The US Civil War, the colony kind of broke up over time. So it's a tiny little place today. It's only about 120 residents, but it's got this really rich, interesting kind of dramatic origin story.
- [05:23]
B
And of course that is something that the both of you discuss in the book. But this book is not just kind of rehashing the origin story. What aspects of Bishop Hill are you kind of most asking questions about, I suppose, in the book? And how did you decide where you'd focus?
- [05:38]
C
Yeah, so our questions initially, I think, as I said, were centered around the tourist experience at Bishop Hill. As you said, Miranda, this is a very small place, Right. Founded in the 19th century. There are no more than 120 people living in it today. And we were intrigued by the sort of fundamental question initially, how is this tiny town attracting tens of thousands of people every year? Right. What are the tourists expecting from it when they visit, and what are they experiencing then when they visit? This is a pretty monumental feat for a community of this few people to attract so much tourism. But the more time that we spent in the village, we found more questions to become curious about. So, for example, shortly before we began our project, this tiny little place also became the site of a major wind farm development that basically now surrounds the town. And this was incredibly disruptive to the community, to their sense of who they were, to their ideas about presenting a simpler time Right. For tourists to partake in, as well as it being an economic boon for the schools and such. So one question that developed out of that was, how does a community like this navigate these competing forms of sustainability? So economic sustainability in the form of the taxes that the wind farms pay, environmental sustainability in the form of green energy, and cultural sustainability in the sense of, you know, this is a heritage spot. Right. This is a spot where people celebrate Swedish immigrant culture. And so basically, the village for us was like an onion. And every time we peeled back a layer, there was something new to discover.
- [07:29]
B
Yeah, and that's not necessarily coming through in the kind of standard tourist story, but taking up that initial question you had of like, what are tourists exactly expecting and getting here? Is there anything further we want to discuss in terms of what that strand of the narrative is saying, for instance, around sort of, what is the point of Bishop Hill? Why was it founded? Why is it special?
- [07:49]
A
Yeah, one of the things that, you know, is really interesting and unique about this place is its visual beauty. So the early colonists built all of these really large, sometimes two and three story tall brick buildings that are really more reminiscent of the kind of Eastern seaboard kind of communities, like Shaker communities, for example, in the eastern part of the US So, and it's all built around a kind of planned town square. So it has this beautiful kind of visual appeal as you kind of pull into the town. So it's evokes for tourists when we. When we interview tourists about what they're looking for and what they're seeing when they're out in. In this village, they do use this narrative of simpler times. You know, there. There's a kind of nostalgia factor to the heritage tourism there, and people do delve a little bit into the actual historical, you know, kind of story of the colony and all of its complicated drama. But usually in the tourist narrative, it's very simplified into a 8 minute sound bite at best. So generally the tourist narrative includes, you know, kind of imagery of these hardy pioneers kind of escaping religious persecution from Sweden and establishing, you know, this community on. On the edge of the frontier and just how difficult that that was. And so it becomes this kind of classic American immigration story as it gets filtered through the. Through the. The sort of nostalgic lens of the tourism industry. So it becomes kind of flattened into a two dimensional sort of story.
- [09:32]
B
Well, we certainly don't want to fall into that trap here. So what are all the things that are not in that story? What are the aspects that maybe should be included but aren't necessarily?
- [09:44]
C
I think, you know, as we got to know the village more, part of our goal in this project was to set the village of Bishop Hill, this tiny, tiny community, inside a much broader tem. Temporal and geographic context. Some of the consequence of the narrative that Adam was talking about, this sort of simplification or two dimensionification of the narrative almost means that Bishop Hill could be anywhere. Like, it's such a familiar story for Americans, particularly these pioneers carving out the frontier, fleeing religious persecution, that it almost gets lost where. Where Bishop Hill is. Right. And so we wanted to place that village in the context of making this entity that we call the Midwest in the United States. Right. So most obviously absent from that tourist friendly sort of version, that 8 minute town bite version of Bishop Hill is Native American presence in the area. Right. Both before and then during the colonies establishment by the Swedes, by the Jansenists. So as we talk about in the book, the Sauk and Mesquakie peoples had occup. Occupied that area of the state for literally decades. And before them, of course, the land had been occupied for literally millennia. Right. So this notion that history begins with the introduction of the Swedish colony is a huge sort of absence in the traditional tourist narrative. There's other ways that Bishop Hill kind of recodes itself from its surroundings as well. So Illinois as a state has an incredibly complicated RAC history too. It's most commonly thought of as, at least in the US as the land of Lincoln and as, you know, the sort of Great north that helped to fight the Civil War. But it was also the site of some of the most restrictive black laws in the country prior to the Civil War. Right. And also the site of some of the most effective and passionist abolitionist activity. So it's a very complicated racial history that the state has, but not neither of Those things gets discussed when talking about heritage and Bishop Hill. And our contention in the book, of course, is that these omissions are not sort of accidental or coincidental, but they're part of how the history of whiteness is established and sort of reinforced in the history of the Midwest.
- [12:16]
B
Yeah, it doesn't sound accidental when you lay it out that way. Indeed. But still some effort kind of has to go into sort of making the Torah story what it is, is. So can we talk about the kind of tourist story and the tourist aspect as sort of an industry? When, for example, do we see the heritage tourism industry kind of really become a thing here with that particular narrative?
- [12:39]
A
Well, they started commemorating their own history really early on. So just 50 years after the establishment of the colony in 1846. So you fast forward to 1896, they held their first major commemoration. So they gathered together descendants from the original colonies. Local dignitaries showed up. And there was also a. A local painter named Olaf Kronz who really wanted to. He sort of aspired to become a fine art painter, but today he's considered a kind of, you know, folk art painter really. So he never quite achieved the kind of fine art skills, but he started painting scenes from his own memory, from his own childhood memory of the colony, and also just stories that people would tell about the early colony days. So these images have kind of come down to us as sort of the first moment of a pretty intense and very nostalgic kind of commemoration of the original colony. And all of that kind of led into the 20th century as some of the buildings started to crumble away because they had been held communally. And then when they. They kind of sold off individual shares in these buildings. Some of the buildings came down to be owned by dozens of families. So you couldn't really, you renovate them, you know, if you only owned one room in one of these big communal buildings. And you certainly couldn't knock them down. So there was this sort of accidental, passive preservation of all the buildings. And eventually around the mid century, people started to recogn that this was actually important to try to preserve these things. And this kind of coincides in the, especially the 1960s and 70s with something that is often called the white ethnic revival in the United States, this sort of new interest in white ethnic identities. And so you get all this kind of, you know, sort of ethnic museums being developed and roots tourism, you know, back to the old country and all that sort of stuff. So that kind of sort of zeitgeist fed into a pretty intensive preservation movement. In the mid to late 20th century. And eventually the village was put on the national historic Register. It's sort of recognized by the state of Illinois as a historic site that is worth preserving. And all of that then gets wrapped up into the development of heritage tourism. So this kind of self conscious commemoration leads to not an internal, you know, sort of inward facing commemoration, but now an outward facing heritage tourism industry. And by the, you know, turn of the century, say 25 years ago or so, you, you have actually hundred, 100,000 tourists or more coming to this tiny village of just over 100 people. So it actually develops into, you know, for its relative size, a fairly significant tourism industry in the region.
- [15:50]
B
And when we're talking about kind of heritage, there are lots of elements to this. There's the sort of, let's go back in time and see what things used to be like. But one of you mentioned briefly there's a sort of Swedish immigrant specific aspect to it. I mean, what is this sort of being in the midst of this heritage industry and all of these visitors, surely they can't all be Swedish. Like what does that mean for senses of identity and kind of thinking about history, but also trying to live your life?
- [16:17]
C
That's such a great question. And I think there's a couple different ways to answer it. One of the things that we talk about in the book is how the Swedish identity has morphed over time, right? So it's not one thing and it's not something that's remained static because of course, the village was founded by people who were rejecting Sweden, right? They were coming to America to reject the Swedish state and the Swedish states own version of Lutheranism. And so in very many ways they were turning their back on all things Swedish. Right? And also, as with many immigrant communities, right. When you get the second generation of immigrants to a place, they have no desire at all to look back to the old country, right? They want to become Americans. And so this notion that it was always sort of interested in its own heritage is a false one. It was very much sort of a contentious thing from very early on. Now that heritage tourism is such a big part of the economy there, we were really interested in how people's sense of self is shaped by being a part of this tourist centered economy, right? Because especially in Bishop Hill, this is a really pronounced dynamic because the village itself is a kind of open air museum where normal everyday people also happen to live, right? So it's not like a Williamsburg, for example, or you know, a sort of town that's artificial It's a real town that also happens to be on the National Historic Register. One of the things that we found in our interviews, any number of people talked about the importance of being on when you come to live in the village and how you have to have a sort of comfort level with being on because you understand that you're part of the traditions and the stories that help keep the town alive. Right. So part of your responsibility as a citizen in the town is to be willing to be an object of the tourist gaze in some ways. And that is a pretty interesting dynamic.
- [18:25]
A
I'd just add that there's a lot of politics, too, like small p. Politics, around the notion of preservation. So, you know, on the one hand, people. They want to. We. We talk about this one case where somebody wanted to put vinyl siding on their house, and they had to bring it before, you know, a board that is concerned with the visual appeal of the town and historic preservation issues. And they went back and forth and back and forth about this vinyl siding, which is, you know, much easier to maintain than the traditional brick or the wooden clapboard siding that you might have found in the 1800s. But this person, you know, convinced this board that, yeah, from the street, it looks like it's from the 1800s, even though it's, you know, made of a modern product. So there. There are all these little decisions along the way that. That happen in a place where people actually live within. Within that kind of heritage district. Right. So lots of negotiations are kind of happening all the time.
- [19:26]
B
Yeah, that was definitely an interesting aspect to read and think about. It is obviously a very small population, but still people going about there every day and kind of, what does this all mean? And, of course, this is all massively complicated by the fact that, Margaret, I believe you mentioned earlier, we sort of turn the page in the book and go, okay, that's a lot already going on. Now let's throw in a huge wind farm.
- [19:48]
C
Right.
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B
So, like, how.
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C
Why.
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B
What is going on here?
- [19:53]
A
Yeah, so living within a heritage district on the one hand is one thing, and then living inside really kind of beneath a massive wind farm is quite another. So, you know, and these things arrive in communities like Bishop Hill, as you said, quite suddenly. The planning process might take a number of years, and in Bishop Hill, it. You know, discussions were being had for many years with individual farming families in the region, but once they start constructing this thing, you know, it goes up within a year or two. And so suddenly, your whole landscape has kind of changed around you, whether you like that or not. And some people do find it kind of appealing. Other people really find it completely polluting. But it does complicate the whole economy of heritage tourism if it's based around this visual appeal of the place and these beautiful buildings. There was a lot of debate that, that happened there about how many miles or, you know, a half mile back from the village these turbines should be set and how tall they. They should be. So, you know, that that was a real concern. So it has a visual impact, for sure. And then it also just complicates again, this narrative of simpler times. You know, it's hard to kind of have this nostalgic kind of feeling about some sort of idyllic, supposedly idyllic 1800s village when, you know, you can actually see from the center of town, if you look carefully, you can see some turbines in the background, right? So you have this kind of backwards temporal focus as you're being nostalgic about it. And then you're kind of lurched into a kind of forward thinking, future thinking kind of temporality as you see these turbines. And it makes you confront the idea that, you know, you're connected to the globe, you're connected to the planet, you're connected to, you know, the climate crisis of 2026, not. Not some nostalgic little village in 1846. So it really kind of does add this. This extra layer. The interesting thing, though, about the early colonists, not only were they rejecting Swedishness, as Margaret said earlier, and you see kind of Swedish symbols all over the town today, but they would have kind of bristled at that. But on the other hand, they were very early and enthusiastic adopters of technology, so they were really excited about steam engines when they came along. They were excited about any sort of new farming equipment. So I suspect that they might have really loved these wind turbines, even though today some locals worry that it's ruining some sort of nostalgic sense of the place. So really interesting kind of contradictions there, I think.
- [22:43]
B
Yeah, that's definitely a fascinating aspect of this, right? People at the. When the village was made kind of going, yeah, this would be great. And people now being like, no, no, no, you're not supposed to want that, right? That ruins everything we've done since then, which is a very interesting contradiction and kind of, I think, not necessarily something that people would expect. I certainly was intrigued by that aspect of it. And actually, while we're on the topic of surprises, was there anything either of you were surprised by in figuring all of this out?
- [23:10]
C
I think one. One of the big surprises was just how complicated the place is. Right. When we went into the project, like I said, we had envisioned, you know, maybe a couple years we would be working on this. Maybe it might be an article. But the. The more we got to know the town, the more it became clear that there was so much going on here, we couldn't fit it in an article. It needed a book. And, in fact, we weren't even sure how to conclude the book.
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B
Right.
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C
Because there was so much that we wanted to say. So the complexity of it and the complexity of every place, I think, was a surprise to me, certainly.
- [23:50]
A
Absolutely. Yeah. For me, too, I think that's been the kind of most delightful surprise, is to realize that you can kind of keep going deeper down lots of different rabbit holes and discover new things all the time about one tiny little place. It kind of reminds me of, you know, the kind of thick description that Clifford Geertz talks about. You know, you can kind of just keep peeling away layers of the narratives and kind of do deeper and deeper contextualized interpretations. So we're really trying to place this one small place in this kind of regional context, in a much deeper historical context, and actually, even in a global context. You know, I think the lessons from this one little place could be applied to lots of other. Other places like it around the country and around the world.
- [24:42]
B
Yeah, let's. Let's dig into some of that. Where is Bishop Hill at kind of now and going forward. What you. We've talked a bit about the history and sort of. But what if we're looking today and in the future?
- [24:52]
C
Sure. As Adam and I have said in different kinds of venues, that the hardest part of this book was knowing how to conclude it. Because, of course, Bishop Hill is, as a place, ongoing, in flux. Right. It's not going to stop just because our book ends. And so we very consciously titled our last chapter not a conclusion, but rather departing, in that we are departing the scene, but Bishop Hill continues. Right. So a few things that are, I think, important sort of reference points. And in where it is now, as Adam was saying, tourism numbers were hit pretty hard during COVID The state, like everywhere, lost a lot of tourist dollars and tourist visits during the COVID years, But that has rebounded. Right. And so that's good news for the town and happy, happy news for the town. The other thing that happened recently that's a good thing for the town is that the state of Illinois recently allocated, I think it was $12 million. Yeah, $12 million for much needed. It's hard to emphasize how much needed maintenance and repair of some of the state owned historic buildings. And that has been a long time coming. Some of those buildings are in desperate need of repair, including the colony church that we talk about in the book. But that being said, the estimated cost of the needed maintenance is higher than $12 million. Right. By a significant amount. So Bishop Hill is both grateful for that allocation of money, but also very cognizant of the fact that it's not going to cover everything that needs to be repaired in the town. And I think the other thing that is happening in Bishop Hill now, just as it's happening at all sites across the US Is that there's, it's a very fraught moment for thinking about history and American history because there's a very public debate about what the content and the purpose of our national history should be. Just recently, maybe four or five days ago, President Trump issued an executive order that instructed signs to be posted outside some of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, warning the public about misinformation that was being provided there. So there's this very public conversation about how we present our history, how we understand our history, who's included in our history. And that's also reflected in Bishop Hill as well.
- [27:38]
B
Yeah, I mean, that part definitely seems relevant across many more places than just Bishop Hill. And that is, Adam, something you were mentioning a little bit about earlier. So perhaps to conclude, what do you both hope that readers, those from within academia and beyond, take from this book, whether to the rest of the country or even beyond?
- [27:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think what Margaret just said is so spot on. You know, how do we, how do we draw lines around historical stories? You know, when did America begin? Was it 1776 or 1619 or, you know, 20,000 years ago, when Native American people first, first came here? And, and Bishop Hill is very much like that, too, in its storytelling. You know, was it founded in 1846? Yes, it was. There's a story before then in the region that, that is also worthy of telling. And then, you know, who, who gets included or excluded, I think is just really important for all communities. And as Margaret said, especially at this kind of fraught political moment where history has become part of the culture wars. And I think one, one thing I really want people to take away from this is how this is a case study about the Midwest. And this idea about the Midwest region in the United States being this kind of flyover country that is a blank canvas and that is very flat. People think it's actually topographically flat. It's not really. People think it's sort of culturally flat. One of the things we're showing here is that it's not really, it's historically flat. Nothing ever really happened here that really couldn't be further from the truth. And in fact, it's kind of a dangerous narrative. We argue in the book that that kind of papers over some of the bloody and awful things that have happened in the Midwest. So it's not only sort of insulting to communities that exist today in the Midwest to sort of say that it's flyover country, but it's actually covering up a whole rich and also, you know, sometimes very ugly history of white supremacy and white settler colonialism that, that needs to be addressed in, in the American Midwest. So, you know, and I would actually say, at least in my own discipline of anthropology, we have academically largely ignored regions like the Midwest. We don't tend to even focus our own academic lenses on this region. So I think that's a real oversight and actually could be kind of a dangerous one. And then I just say the other, the other thing that I think our book contributes both to an academic audience but also a non academic one is how people live with heritage and how they live with green energy economics. So there's a lot of big data studies and kind of, you know, 20,000 foot perspectives on, for example, you know, wind farms or solar farms and how, you know, we need to move forward with green energy technologies. And yet for communities who literally from the ground up are dealing with, you know, having to, you know, live side by side with wind turbines, what is that experience like? So, you know, this book contributes, I think, to that conversation as well.
- [31:02]
B
Lots of great takeaways there. Lots of different contributions to different conversations. So thank you both for helping us conclude our discussion with those thoughts. But I am curious what you're each working on separately or together now that the book is done, Anything related or not you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [31:21]
D
Sure.
- [31:22]
C
Sadly they are separate projects, but I'm sure we'll come together in a project in the future. My project that I'm working on picks up on this dynamic that Adam was talking about, about how people live with environmental sustainability initiatives. Right. And climate mitigation initiatives. And so I'm looking at my own community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and a recent debate around the removal of the Shaker Lakes, which are a very important sort of cultural, historical part of the landscape here that for reasons of flooding and the like are likely going to be eliminated. And so I'm looking at the sort of debates and tension around the removal
- [32:07]
A
of those lakes and similar to the project that Margaret and I have worked on that led to this book. We were talking about her new project the other day, and she was talking about how she initially thought it would be an article. And we both concluded, no, it's a book.
- [32:24]
B
Book.
- [32:24]
A
It has to be a book. So it sounds like a really rich, cool project that she's working on. I've been working on a, I have a book manuscript with a historian, a Swedish historian that we're initially entitling Refracted Roots, which is about Swedish Americans up in Minnesota, which is also, you know, a small kind of regional part of the United States, but emblematic of big debates that are happening across the United States. You know, given the killing of George Floyd, for example, there's a kind of racial and policing politics there. And we're looking at Swedish Americans and how they're navigating political polarization within their friend and family groups. So it's the highest concentration of Swedish American immigrants is up in kind of southeastern Minnesota. So we're kind of looking at this intersection between ethnic identities and political identities. And we kind of are questioning whether or not this white ethnic revival and the sort of celebration of hyphenated American identities can survive the current political kind of polarized moment in the United States, which we argue has become cultural, that it's not simply about politics anymore. It's actually become a series of cultural identities, and we suspect that they're overtaking other identities like ethnic identities. So again, it's kind of a case study of one ethnic group. But we think it applies to the the whole kind of debate about political polarization in the United States today.
- [33:58]
B
Well, it sounds like you're both going to stay very busy with your different projects, so thank you for the sneak previews. And of course, while you're pursuing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Becoming Utopia, History, Heritage and Sustainability in the American Midwest, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2026. Margaret Adam, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [34:21]
C
Thanks so much for having us.
- [34:23]
A
Thank you so much, Miranda.
- [34:24]
D
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