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The story of aeriality and midwesternness is a complicated mixture of innovation and continuity. It begins with an assessment of preaviation aerial gazes as a means of seeing, conceptualizing, and constructing prairie space. Faced with the unconventional topography of the prairie in its natural state, the region’s first settlers found traditional horizontally oriented modes of sight insufficiently able to convey an imagery for, or an understanding of, the region. Consequently, the first Midwesterners developed an alternative practice of envisioning the region in which imagined bird’s-eye prospects, coupled with more abstract and cartographically constructed gazes, provided a means to escape the overwhelming openness and relative featurelessness of the terrain and imagine the landscape as organized and hospitable. These practices of aerial looking also exhibited substantial congruence to the broad, rational gaze embedded in the government’s land-survey grid—the actual and ideological template by which the region was settled. Chapter 1 underscores the ways that that grid view and aerial imagination came together to fashion a particular, Jeffersonian, image of the region and its inhabitants and a specialized mode of atlas-oriented prairie description and representation. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for understanding the historically constructed relationship between Midwestern identity and aerial representation.

Chapter 3 examines the aerialized farmscapes of regionalist artist Grant Wood and the fissure between the old and new iconographies of Midwestern culture that erupted in the 1930s. Wood’s sense of aeriality veered from the bucolic to the vertiginous as his landscapes morphed, over the course of the decade, from mythic agrarian scenes to somewhat otherworldly, yet also strikingly modern, spaces. The chapter interrogates Wood’s adoption and consequent adaptation of a Midwestern aerial sensibility as a means of negotiating the changes that technological and cultural modernity were delivering upon the region. Beginning by identifying Wood’s use of a nineteenth-century bird’s-eye iconography as a means to reinsert traditional form and value into the contemporary regional scene, the chapter extends into a consideration of the growing dynamism and increasingly ambivalent modernity of Wood’s later painting. For Wood, the experience of modern aeriality served not only as a tool of modern agrarian recodification, but also as a source for hybrid integration of old and new modes for envisioning the look and idea of the Midwest.

Chapter 4 studies the impact of Midwestern aerial vision on a broader scope of 1930s landscape representation by demonstrating the central place of Midwestern image and ideology in the development of new schemes for democratic and utopian urban life, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan for Broadacre City. Intended to unite both city and countryside into a single space, Wright’s project created a uniquely American and Midwestern template for a new kind of urban landscape—one that integrated the forms and forces of American industrial modernity with the long-standing ideologies and patterns of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy. In order to bring together these two different understandings of space and culture, Wright leaned heavily on two interconnected practices of Midwestern aeriality: the first evident in the deployment of aerial vision as a tool for the rational reordering of both country and city environments, and the second evident in the way Wright and other like-minded planners explicitly embraced the agrarian landscape as a model for their new visions for urban life. The architect’s ideas and the responses they generated underscore the efficacy of the Midwestern landscape as a model for conceiving a much more extensive set of American spatial and cultural revisionings.