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Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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 Dr. Flannery Burke about her book titled Back East How Westerners Invented a Region, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. This book does, I guess, the opposite of what we often think about, which is usually writers in the east of the United States imagining the west and creating all sorts of, you know, border towns and saloons and sheriffs and all that sort of stuff there. Also, as this book and our discussion will discuss, was the opposite thing happening of authors in the American west imagining the East? Sometimes in nice ways, sometimes in not Nice ways. Right. Having all sorts of implications about what these different regions, you know, in some ways, the other is doing. So there's a lot of interesting sort of ideas and developments here to talk about across a bunch of different genres and time. Flannery, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Absolutely. Absolutely. So I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and my mother's family traces some of their ancestry to Spanish colonization in the American Southwest. And most of my dad's ancestors immigrated directly to northeastern Kansas. So I didn't have family stories or memories about ancestors slowly moving west. I am not Native American, but kind of all I knew were these two places, northern New Mexico and northeastern Kansas. And as you were saying in the introduction, there's an extensive scholarship about how Easterners imagined the western United States. But when I began my PhD and I decided I wanted to study the culture and the history of the American West, I didn't find that scholarship entirely satisfactory because it didn't reflect my experience and my family's experience, which was not imagining the western United States States, but imagining the eastern United States. And so I wanted to write a book where Westerners were not the object of investigation, but the subjects, the ones doing the imagining.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. That is a helpful backstory and lets us get straight into these writers and what they did to create these imaginaries. First off, making sure that we're very clear about who we're talking about and where they're from. The writers that you focus on in the book that were so influential, that were talking about the impact that they had, were they from the east themselves? And if not, what sorts of sources were they drawing on to create these ideas of what the east was?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
So, no, they were not from the east themselves, and that was a rule for myself writing the book. So I limited myself to Westerners who, for the most part, were born in the American west, who were born west of the Mississippi river, who identified as Westerners, and who learned of the east from family memories or from first impressions and especially from books. So their own reading led them to imagine this place called Back East. So even if they were not returning to the east themselves, even if their families had not come from the east, they called this place that they imagined Back East. And they drew extensively from their own local literary worlds, bookstores, libraries, archives, universities, visiting writers to figure out what back east looked like and sounded like and.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Felt like, yeah, that makes sense to have that as a rule for yourself, but still worth clarifying so that we can discuss what they're doing going forward. Thinking then about where some of these inspirations would kind of come from or some of the ideas that were being drawn on. What about dude ranches and railroads? How big a deal were these things in creating these ideas of east and west in the early 20th century?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
So in the 1920s and 1930s, dude ranches were part of the hospitality industry, and they still are. You know, they're basically hotels where you get to ride a horse. And Westerners who worked in dude ranches were in the hospitality industry. So they were really adept at observing their customers and figuring out what their customers expectations were, anticipating those expectations and trying to serve them in a way that furthered their industry. Dude ranches worked very, very closely with railroads to advertise rail travel and advertise dude ranches. So often dude ranches would pick people up at a Western railway station, either in a coach or in a car, and then take them to the ranch where people would ride horses for the week or the month. And so much of the advertising for dude ranches was a product of both Eastern and Western advertisers. Eastern advertisers were imagining what dude ranches were like and what the west was like, and dude ranchers were imagining what Eastern customers were like and what they wanted. And so the advertising was a product of both. Both the ranches who were anticipating their customers and the advertisers back EAs who were anticipating what Eastern customers would want.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Advertising definitely key for coming up with ideas of places so useful to understand the factor here. Was there anything else you wanted to tell us at this point?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
I guess I'd say one of my favorite Western advertisers for dude ranches and for the railroad was a Crow man, an Absaroka man named Max Big Man. And Max Big man used his travel on the railways, which was paid for by the railways. He used that travel to advocate for the sovereignty of the Crow Nation. So he was acutely aware of what Eastern expectations were of him as a Westerner, especially as a Western Native American. But he also was acutely aware of his own identity as an easterner. So when he went to Chicago, he said, what are you all going to do now that you don't have Al Capone to advertise the city? So he really was thinking about what places are and how places are advertised all the time. At the same Time as he was thinking politically on behalf of the Crow Nation and individually on behalf of how he could advertise his own land, his wife's land, his own needs as a political operative and an economic operative in Montana in the early 20th century.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely important to understand the kind of intertwined motives here.
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Nothing historically is ever as simple as this. One thing is 100% why something happened. Right. It's always more interesting and more complicated.
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Dr. Flannery Burke
And for someone like Max Big man, he always had to come at it sideways because the people who were talking to him in New York City and Chicago were like, wow, you must be so surprised to see skyscrapers. Even though, you know, he had listened to the radio, he had seen advertising, he had read books, you know, like, he was a modern man, just like the advertisers that he was talking to. But there was this expectation that he would be primitive, that he would be behind the times, and he played on that expectation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's helpful to establish in the sort of early 20th century. If we move forward, though, why were the years immediately after World War II so important for further developing and cementing these ideas about east and West?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
So wars are when people move. And once I really zoomed out with the book, I figured out that that's one of the reasons why so many of the dates from my footnotes in my initial research were 1946-1947-1948-1949. Also in the United States, New Deal programs meant to counter the Great Depression encouraged a fluorescence of celebration of regional cultures and local cultures. So Americans had just gone through this period of time in the 1930s, where they were really encouraged to celebrate their own local culture. That's part of what Max Big man was participating in. And then during the war, people moved. And people who moved had been educated in a deep appreciation of their local environs and their local region. And they were exposed to new parts of the country. And in many cases, they settled in those new parts of the country, or they moved there after the war. And the years after World War II were extraordinarily prosperous in the United States. The United States had been virtually untouched by the World War itself, and they had really invested economically in wartime production. And so as they were converting that industrial development to peacetime production and to Cold War production to be comprehensive, as they were converting to that, they were reflecting on where they were from, where they had moved to, and how the region they were from and the region they had moved to were different. So there was all of this money to support print culture, to explore this reflection. And people were really reflecting on regional difference in the years immediately after World War II.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. I mean, it does make sense. As you said, people definitely moved for the war. Thinking then about some of the centers of where people were moving around this time, at least in my mind, Chicago kind of always comes up as a big deal at this point. So I wasn't particularly surprised to get to that section of the book and see that you were also interested in Chicago and how people were thinking about it. And how and why and when, though, did Chicago come to be seen not necessarily as Midwest or North, but as part of the East?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
So what's crucial for understanding this book is that it's all about perspective. And Chicago is really tricky because there are multiple back east perspectives at play in Chicago. Chicagoans have their own back east, and that's usually New York City. And their back east is often pretty condescending. So most scholars trace the origin of the name Second City, which is often ascribed to Chicago. Most scholars trace that to a New Yorker writer named A.J. liebling, who wrote about Chicago in the early 1950s. And he called Chicago the second city. But of course, that means there's a first city, and that first city is New York. So that's the first back East. That's Chicagoan's back East. But for people further west, people living on the Great Plains or in the Rocky Mountains or on the West Coast, Chicago is the origin point for a lot of railroad lines. And if you're familiar with the Route 66 song, Chicago is the origin of Route 66. Farmers also are far more likely to think first of the commodities Board of Exchange in Chicago than they are the New York Stock Exchange when they are thinking about the market for their goods. So there were all of these people kind of primed to think of Chicago as back East. And definitely in the highly mobile years Following World War II, if you were in Seattle or Iowa or Arizona, you might have seen Chicago the same way that Chicagoans saw New York, which was urban, moneyed and powerful. So there were multiple Back Easts for Westerners depending on where in the West a person began and what their situation in the west was.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's worth clarif. Yeah, that's definitely worth emphasizing the idea that it's all about perspective here and ideas and kind of how these things go together. So one of the ideas that you mention, especially in the book, is the Marginal man thesis. Can you tell us a bit more about what this is and how this contributes to this. These ideas of east and west that we've been discussing.
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Absolutely. And this is probably the most eggheady part of the book, so bear with me. I will get to a full answer to your question. So the Marginal man thesis was a thesis devised by the sociologist Robert Park. Park was a founding figure of the Chicago School of Sociology, which still influences urban planning in the United States and emerged from sociological study of ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1920s and the 1930s. Park himself came from a rural background in Minnesota, and he worked as a journalist before moving into the academy. His quintessential marginal man was Jewish, cosmopolitan, and lived somewhat on the mainstream of. Somewhat on the margins of mainstream Christian American life. I think that park kind of liked the image of the marginal man that he had built. I think he saw his own move from country to city, from journalism to the academy, as parallel to the portrait of the marginal man that he sketched. He applied this notion of. And park himself was white. He applied this notion of the marginal man to non white Americans, specifically African Americans, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Asian Americans. He believed very, very deeply that occupying the position of the marginal man did not have to mean being marginalized. He thought that with adequate education, white Christians could learn to accept non Christians and non whites. And that with a little assimilation, not conversion to Christianity, but with acceptance of middle class bourgeois norms, that marginal men could be fully integrated into American society. I talk about two Western non white people extensively in one chapter of the book. One was African American, Horace Caton, who was originally from Seattle. And the other was also a Seattleite, a Westerner named Frank Miyamoto, who was Asian American, who was Japanese American. Both of them went back east, so to speak, to Chicago to study sociology in the Chicago School. And they both tried to square their experiences with the theory of the marginal man. But they both ultimately concluded that anti black and anti Asian prejudice had deeper and more complicated roots than park had explored. And that it was not assimilation on the part of marginal men that would lead to equality, but an interrogation and a dismantling of American structural racism. So, you know, both were Westerners, both by virtue of their race and their regional origins, initially perceived themselves as marginal men. And I think that's in part because park had sketched a portrait that was inviting, it included himself. But both ultimately concluded that the theory did not fully encapsulate the experiences that they had had. And Miyamoto especially had moved east, moved to Chicago initially to study sociology. And then he moved east again to study Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated in Western camps and then forcibly relocated to Chicago as a part of World War II. Policies that were executed by the Franklin Roosevelt administration. I hope that was not, like, too deep an answer.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, it was fascinating. So thank you for. Thank you for explaining.
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Okay. I hope it wasn't too much in my own head. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, this is the sort of thing that is interesting to understand of how something that seems like it could be an abstract idea kind of then actually plays out. Right. So, in fact, it's this link between imaginaries and policy that I'd love for us to talk about next. Because obviously, understanding how ideas develop and how ideas spread is interesting in and of itself. Absolutely. But also when it then intertwines into, like, policy choices, that adds a whole extra layer. So can you tell us more about liberal policies around land use and income inequality and what they have to do with these regionalist imaginaries?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Absolutely, absolutely. And I know your audience is really international, so I just want to clarify that when I say liberal policies in the book, I mean policies that result from lowercase D, Democratic deliberation. So I'm not referring to the political left or the center in the United States. I'm not referring to the Democratic Party following World War II. Western writers who accepted liberalism as a frame, who accepted that notion of democratic deliberation leading to policy that serves the greater good, people who. Writers who accepted that frame advocated for Western land conservation and for Western laborers and for Western land ownership in the halls of Congress. And sometimes they were quite successful. And I am thinking of people like Wallace Stegner, who is probably the best known Western writer in the United States and outside of the United States. He taught at Stanford. I'm also thinking of a close mentor of his who's not widely known anymore, a guy named Bernard DeVoto, who wrote for Harper's Magazine. And Bernard DeVoto's wife is actually much better known today. His wife was Avis devoto, and she. She was the culinary editor for Julia Childs. But in their day, Bernard DeVoto was better known. And Bernard DeVoto served on a committee, that advisory committee for Congress on National Parks. Wallace Degner served on that committee. And Wallace Stegner later became an advisor to the Secretary of the Interior, Stuart Udall, who was from Arizona. And as I said, sometimes they were quite successful. And they were able to convert land that had been a national monument to national park status, which is much more secure in the American political system from development. So if you move from monument to park, that land is more protected. But most of these, in fact, all of these people I have mentioned, Wallace Stegner, Bernard devoto, Stuart Udall, they were all white men, and they were all white men with a great deal of influence. Stuart Udall was the Secretary of the Interior. Wallace Stegner taught at Stanford. Bernard DeVoto wrote for Harper's, and he had close ties to Harvard University. And so they were all pretty confident that if they made their voices heard in liberal democratic policy making, that they would have influence. But they were not always attentive to the voices of Native Americans and Mexican Americans and Native Americans and Mexican Americans in the United States. Liberal democratic process do not always have voices that are as heavily weighted as those of people like Stuart Udall, Wallace Stegner, and Bernard DeVoto. And so compromise is a necessary part of liberal democratic decision making. And that did not always GR to native voices and Mexican American voices, the same weight, especially in conversations about conservation, about land conservation, as it did those more powerful white men.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very interesting indeed to see the impact of all of this. Obviously, we're talking here about race. Can we go so far as to link the conversation to white nationalist radicalism?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
I think that we can. And a lot of your listeners might already be familiar with this book, but if they're not, I really encourage them to become familiar with this book. I think the absolute best book about white power in the United States is Kathleen Ballou's Bring the War Home. And in that book, Dr. Ballew says that the white power movement was and is urban and rural, and that it existed all over the United States. So after reading her work, I found myself wondering why the movement, the white power movement, is so commonly associated with the rural West. And that's partly because of events like the Ruby Ridge standoff. That's partly the result of things like the Oklahoma City bombing. But what I found in my research in the White power publication that I researched most deeply, that was called the Primrose and Cattleman's Gazette, and it was published in eastern Colorado in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s. And I found that the Gazette's writers were using Western iconography and Western rhetoric and Western mythology and even Western history about agrarian populism. And we can revisit that term, populism if you want. I realized that they were using all of this Western stuff to cover over what was their real orientation, which moved along those interstate highways that run south to north on the Great Plains. So part of the false association of the rural west with white Power was a product of Eastern prejudice and Eastern stereotype. And part of it was a product of rural Western white power reactionaries using that prejudice to their own strategic advantage as they organized. And their prejudices were anti Semitic as well as anti black, anti Asian, anti Mexican. Their prejudices were extensive.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, they did not limit themselves in that sense. Is all of this historical only, or are there ways in which we're still seeing these sort of mid 20th century regional imaginaries still being relevant today?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
I think so. So I think that shows like Yellowstone and Landman, which are by the same creator, I'm forgetting his name. I think they are contemporary manifestations of ideas about out west and Back East. I think Kevin Costner has a show called Out West. So that's definitely playing with these regional imaginaries. I think that a lot of the misperceptions of farm life that permeate present day political conversations come from these regional imaginaries. There is an extensive Latino and Latina farm workforce in New England that doesn't get a lot of attention because that's not where people imagine Latinx farm workers are, but that is one of the places that they are. So I think Westerners also still have misprocessions of the east as moneyed and elite, when, of course, there are lots of working class Easterners who are, you know, racially diverse. Diverse in all sorts of ways. So, yeah, I think all of that is still at play in contemporary American culture.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely interesting to understand. What about the area of popular culture that still today has the word Western in it? The genre of film, of course. Should we think of there being an Eastern category of film, given that we have one for Western? You're telling us how east is an imaginary too. Should there be an Eastern film category?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
I definitely think so, and I think there already is. We just don't call it an Eastern. So this is an oldie but a goodie. I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan and in. And Anderson is from Texas in the Royal Tenenbaums. Royal Tenenbaum leaves his family to go stay at the 375th Street Y. And I remember when Royal Tenenbaums came out, I saw a photo exhibition by Laura Wilson. Laura Wilson is the mother of Owen and Luke Wilson. And Owen and Luke Wilson appear in a number of Wes Anderson films. And Laura Wilson, who is also from Texas, she said that in one of the captions to one of the photos that she took of people on the set of the Royal Tenenbaums, she said that the 375th Street Y is totally something that someone who had built their image of New York City from reading the New Yorker and, you know, watching movies and from television. That's totally something that a Westerner would think of if that was all you had to go on. So I think the Royal Tenenbaums is an Eastern. I think that Lady Bird by the director Greta Gerwig, which is about a young woman who moves from Sacramento, California, to go to college back east at Barnard College in New York City, I think that Lady Bird is an Eastern. So I think Easterns are already out.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
There, and maybe we'll have a formal category for them at some point. Who knows?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
Yes, maybe we can start calling them Easterns. Something I say in the book is that once you know how to look back east is all over the place.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is there anything further that we've discussed, a little bit that you want to tell us more about or anything we haven't mentioned that you want to include before we wrap up our conversation on the book?
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Dr. Flannery Burke
If you want to circle back to agrarian populism, we can. If that's too, like, insider, let's go for it. All right. So I know in Europe, populism is almost always used to refer to the reactionary right, but in the United States, there's a leftist populace tradition that goes back to farmer radicalism and farmer labor partnerships in the 1890s. And when I first started writing Back East, I thought that it would start in the 1890s with agrarian populism. And I was working with a research assistant, a marvelous librarian now at Princeton University University, named Brian Winston. He was my graduate assistant. And we kept dead ending in our secondary source research in the 1930s. We just weren't finding a lot of Back east rhetoric among populists agrarian populace of the 1890s. And I finally decided that it was actually 1930s historians, especially this historian named John Hicks, who wrote the first definitive history of agrarian populism of the 1890s. I decided that John Hicks had kind of invented agrarian populism as a Western phenomenon, and he had relied on this group of letters that was published in a publication called Review of Reviews. And the group of letters was called a bundle of Western Letters. And so I'm speaking very, very much to fellow historians of the of the Great Plains. But I really think that agrarian populism was kind of invented as a Western phenomenon by historians of the 1930s.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Love those sorts of historical artifacts. Thank you very much for sharing that with us. Before I let you Go, though. Well, first, was there anything further you want to tell us about this book? I don't mean to cut you off.
- [31:02]
Dr. Flannery Burke
Well, I guess the other thing I would say is that these white reactionary white power advocates who from the 1970s and early 1980s who I talk about in the book, they were also polling on that agrarian populist rhetoric. So I don't think they well represented it. I don't think they well understood kind of just how leftist a lot of those 1890s agrarian populace were, but they were pulling on that history in their own promotion of white power in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
- [31:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always interesting to see how things influence each other forward and backwards in time. Speaking of going forward in time, though, is there anything you're working on now that this book is done that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [31:56]
Dr. Flannery Burke
Yeah, yeah. So I'm planning. It's in very, very early stages, but I'm planning a book based in part on my family history that I'm calling Hercules junior and the Lost Territory. And it will be a close study of the community around Watrous, New Mexico, which is not far from an area of New Mexico that was really hard hit by the worst fire in New Mexico history, called the Calf canyon fire in 2022. But it's called Hercules Jr. And the lost Territory for these reasons. Two of my grandfather's uncles, Eric Ilano and Edmundo Baca, fought in World War I and Edmundo died in the war. And he's buried in Arlington National Cemetery as Edmund. And in fact, all of my grandfather's surviving siblings named a child Edmund, including my grandfather himself, who was named Edmund. Eric Ulano died not long after in a railroad accident, and he's buried in Chicago Shoemaker, New Mexico, which is not far from Watrous. The Lost Territory of the title refers to the World War I battlefield where Edmundo was killed, but also to that land that was lost to Mexican Americans via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the land lost to native people through Spanish colonization, including the colonization that was executed by my ancestors. The landscape lost in the Caff Canyon Fire and my family's lost connection to that land that was stewarded by Erculano and Edmundo's parents. And their names were Ana and Jose Herculano. So that's where the Junior of Hercules junior Comes from. That area is also near an international high school that I attended called the United World College of the American West. The United World Colleges now have campuses all over the world. There's one in Wales there's one in Italy, there's one in Germany, there's one in Singapore, there's one in Hong Kong, there's one in Japan. They're all over. And the UWC campus that I attended is also near Watrous. And so this kind of tension between local and cosmopolitanism that I explore in Back East, I think it's going to be present in Hercules junior And the Lost Territory, too.
- [34:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That will certainly be very interesting. Best of luck with the project.
- [34:32]
Dr. Flannery Burke
Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [34:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Anyone who wants to learn more about Back east can of course read the book titled exactly that with the subtitle of How Westerners Invented a Region, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. Flannery, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [34:49]
Dr. Flannery Burke
Miranda, thank you so much for having me. This was a real joy.
- [35:05]
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