After setting myself the task of writing a paper on “growing up Midwestern,” otherwise known as “Midwestern childhood,” I realized I had made a horrible mistake. The harder I thought about the topic, the muddier my thoughts became. The truth is that we know a great deal about individual Midwestern childhoods, but what we know about Midwestern childhood, writ large, is considerable less clear. What does it mean to “grow up Midwestern?” If a historian takes her cues from economist John Ise’s autobiographical account of growing up in the late 19th century in north central Kansas, it means to work hard on a family’s land, experience drought, grasshoppers and near economic ruin, and decide in one’s adult years to make a life somewhere other than the farm.