Book Review                                      

Illinois history ill-served
by errors of omission
By RICHARD S. TAYLOR

Lois A. Carrier. Illinois: Crossroads of a Continent. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. 283 with illustrations, appendices, bibliography and index. $29.95 (cloth).

Illinois: Crossroads of a Continent is the only one-volume history of the state currently in print. Authored by freelance writer and former teacher Lois Carrier, it seems clearly aimed at the small but enduring market created by Illinois history courses. The University of Illinois Press may even hope that it will replace Robert Howard's serviceable though now dated and out-of-print Illinois: A History of the Prairie Stale (1972) as the standard text.

Carrier warns that her book provides only "a beginning, not the whole story" and then writes her way through the state's past in an apparently straightforward fashion. There are 26 short chapters arranged chronologically and neatly sorted into five parts; each chapter includes textbook-style sections and subsections, a concluding summary and suggestions for further reading. Carrier's flat writing style contributes to the overall impression that this is a dull but functional little volume suitable for beginners and appropriate for classroom use, hardly profound but harmless enough and perhaps useful in its place. Not so. Using this book in an Illinois history course as anything other than a negative example would be a terrible disservice to students. It is factually unreliable, woefully uninformed and covertly political.

My confidence in both author and publisher gradually waned as I incidentally stumbled across factual errors sprinkled throughout the text. Considered individually, each mistake may not amount to much, but taken together these niggling errors add up, reinforcing the conclusion that one should be wary of this book's veracity. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, was not nominated in 1858 by the "Republican National Convention" but by that party's state convention. William Randolph Hearst donated the site of New Salem to the Old Salem Chautauqua Association rather than the state; William Walling did not write about the Springfield race riot of 1908 in the "Springfield Independent," a periodical published in New York and Boston; and the General Assembly considered returning Santa Anna's wooden leg to Mexico at the beginning of World War II, not World War I (this mistake is made on page 85 but later corrected on page 218).

The author neglects such pivotal topics as religion, ethnicity, social development and cultural conflict in favor of more exotic stories

Far more egregious, however, are errors of omission. The author neglectssuch pivotal topics as religion, ethnicity, social development and cultural conflict in favor of exotic stories about Santa Anna's leg, simplistic and misleading tales of the "Wild and Reckless Twenties" and a bizarre, breathless, pagelong description of Chicago's State of Illinois Center. Condensing Illinois history into one slim volume admittedly presents challenges of selectivity, but Carrier appears oblivious to the historical scholarship of the last 20 years. Nowhere do such worthwhile books as Don Harrison Doyle's The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70 (1978), John Mack Faragher's Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986) and John Hoffmann's A Guide to the History of Illinois (1991) appear in the suggested readings or bibliography, and they seem not to have influenced the author's approach to Illinois history in the slightest.

Worse still, there are undisclosed, unexamined and possibly even unintended interpretive assumptions with important political implications lurking beneath the just-the-facts demeanor of what might otherwise be dismissed as a merely flawed and superficial work. The book distorts Illinois history by turning it into an unambiguous and celebratory saga of modernization with sturdy pioneers, clever entrepreneurs, ambitious businessmen and right-thinking reformers as its heroes and heroines. Illinois history thus becomes a triumphalist middle-class myth of origins, which may indeed be how many Illinoisans view their past (see Andrew R.L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation [1990] for a critique of this approach). Yet developments like public education were not naturally emerging improvements, the inevitable consequences of modernization described by the author. They were (and still are) bitterly contested, socially constituted and perpetually contingent phenomena arising from struggles between specific religious, ethnic and social groups. Similarly, the reformers invariably presented here as right-thinking advocates for disadvantaged groups seeking to share modernization's bounty were often bitter critics of the modem and middle class values otherwise celebrated in the text.

Writing state history is clearly a thankless and demanding task involving complex problems of coverage, synthesis and interpretation. Academic historians equal to the challenge generally dismiss it with unbecoming contempt as unworthy of their attention. Meanwhile, Illinois history exists for the state's schools in a kind of educational limbo — not required but sometimes taught. This produces a modest market for single-volume histories of the state. But absent support from professional historians and subsidies from organizations like the Illinois State Historical Society, publishers may continue to fill the market with poorly executed and profoundly misleading works such as Carrier's. This would be a shame, since Illinois history and its students deserve better.

Dr. Richard Taylor, chief of technical services in the Historic Sites Division of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, has written extensively on 19th-century religion and education in Illinois. He is an adjunct member of the History Program faculty at Sangamon State University.

June 1994/Illinois Issues/33