Frederick Jackson Turner Award
The Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Achievement in Midwestern History is an annual award given to senior scholars and/or public historians. It is intended to honor historians whose work carries forth Turner’s interest and influence upon the practice of Midwestern history across multiple professional dimensions. The individual receiving this award should have demonstrated a long-standing commitment to the promotion of the history of the Midwest. Evidence of this commitment can include, but is not limited to: publication of a body of books or articles on the subject; publication of a single, particularly important book or article on the subject; a long and distinguished career within a Midwestern historical agency; teaching and training that has promoted the history of the Midwest; service within historical organizations that has promoted the history of the Midwest. The Frederick Jackson Turner Award Committee invites nominations from scholars across disciplines, but whose focus is principally historical.
The 2023 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Contributions to Midwestern History is made to R. Douglas Hurt, Professor of History at Purdue University.
Doug Hurt is a distinguished historian of American agriculture whose numerous publications encompass the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries and include overviews of American agriculture and regional studies on southern and Midwestern farming.
Hurt received his PhD from Kansas State University. His career has included work in public history, teaching, and editing. He was curator of agricultural history for the Ohio History Society, associate director of the Missouri Historical Society, and then taught for many years at Iowa State University. At Iowa State, he taught courses on the American Midwest, producing a generation of graduate students who have gone on to be noted historians of the Midwest themselves. In 2003, he moved to Purdue to become its department head. From 1994 to 2003, he edited the journal Agricultural History.
Doug Hurt has published numerous monographs, many of which contribute to the field of Midwestern history. The committee was impressed not just with the number of books, but by their breadth. His publications include general studies such as American Agriculture: A Brief History (published in 1994 and revised in 2002) and American Farms: Exploring Their History (1996). He has written on Indian agriculture and African American life in the rural South in the first half of the twentieth century. He has authored specialized studies on American farm tools and agricultural technology—works valued by museum curators—as well as on the Department of Agriculture. He has written two biographies: one of frontiersman Nathan Boone and another of the regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton. He has written on agriculture in Missouri’s Little Dixie, the Dust Bowl, and authored The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830 in Indiana University Press’s series of Midwestern frontier histories. He has published two books on agriculture in the Civil War as well as studies on the rural west, the Great Plains, and the rural South since World War II. In 2022, he edited A Companion to American Agricultural History in the Wiley Blackwell series, a recognition of his stature in the field of agricultural history.
None of this includes his numerous journal articles, book chapters, and popular history publications on the Midwest and Midwestern agriculture. Nor does it include his public presentations throughout the Midwest to community groups, historical societies, museums, and Civil War roundtables.
For his long and significant contributions to Midwestern history, R. Douglas Hurt is the Midwestern History Association 2022 Frederick Jackson Turner award winner.
Past Award Recipient
2021 Recipient: Jon K. Lauck
Jon K. Lauck, the founding President of the Midwest History Association and Adjunct Professor of History and Political Science at the University of South Dakota, is the 2022 winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Achievement in Midwestern History. Jon is the one of the most prolific historians in the long record of Midwestern scholarship. His monographs include American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953-1980 (2000), Daschle v. Thune: Anatomy of a High Plains Senate Race (2007), Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889, (2010). In 2013 he published the book that sparked the self-conscious reawakening of heartland history, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History.
More than a scholar Jon Lauck is a master networker—building bridges between scholars, politicians, and citizens to further a renaissance of Midwestern identity. This is demonstrated by his cooperative stewardship of numerous co-edited collections from the forthcoming Oxford History of the Midwest to the multiple volumes of The Plains Political Tradition, and numerous other collections. He brought this talent for collaboration and conviviality to the formation of the Midwestern History Association. Significantly these efforts began over beer in Hudson, Wisconsin in 2013.
A son of the middle west Jon was born in South Dakota educated in history at the University of Iowa and in the law at the University of Minnesota. His seemingly tireless commitment to the region’s history continues in numerous publication projects and his service as editor of Middle West Review. His career, from which can be expected so much more, has nonetheless well earned him the Midwestern History Association’s 2022 Frederick Jackson Turner Award.
Photo by Ted Frantz