Barnstorming the Prairies (Paperback)

Jason Weems

ISBN 10: 0816677514 / ISBN 13: 9780816677511

Published by University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2015

About this Item

Paperback. Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative natureand power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of theairplane. Jason Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices ofaerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid thetechnological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century. Barnstorming the Prairies Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780816677511

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Barnstorming the Prairies (Paperback)
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816677514
• ISBN 13: 9780816677511
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon—and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself.

Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it.

Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.

About the Author

Jason Weems is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside.