What do you think?
Rate this book
American Folkways #13
North Star Country
North Star Country explores country stores and county fairs, labor unions and dusty roads traveled by peddlers and truck drivers, and farms where families toil. Written in 1945 by acclaimed activist and writer Meridel Le Sueur, this unconventional history shines an uncommon light on ordinary people in the Upper Midwest. In the tradition of James Agee and John Dos Passos, Le Sueur creates a mosaic from the fabric of everyday life, including newspaper clippings, private letters, diaries, and lyrics from popular songs. Each quotation and brief vignette opens a window to an entire lifetime or a way of life. North Star Country highlights the struggles of American Indians and offers a fresh sensibility, untangling the history of the Upper Midwest, sorting it out, and returning it to the common people, to common readers.
348 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
2 people are currently reading
170 people want to read
About the author
Meridel Le Sueur
41 books39 followers“The people are a story that never ends,
A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
Meridel LeSueur, North Star Country (1945)
Meridel LeSueur’s poetry, her short stories, and novels are a beloved part of the cultural and political fabric of our times. She was one of the great women literary and communal voices of the twentieth century, which her long life spanned. In describing her own roots Meridel wrote, “I was born at the beginning of the swiftest and bloodiest century at Murray, Iowa in a white square puritan house in the corn belt, of two physically beautiful people who had come west through the Indian and the Lincoln country, creating the new race of the Americas by enormous and rugged and gay matings with the Dutch, the Indian, the Irish; being preachers, abolitionists, agrarians, radical lawyers on the Lincoln, Illinois, circuit. Dissenters and democrats and radicals through five generations.”
Meridel was born on February 22, 1900, and she died in Hudson, Wisconsin on November 14, 1996. As a child she lived in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Minnesota. She believed in giving voice to people’s struggles. She said she learned early to write down what they were saying, hiding behind water troughs in the streets, under tables at home—listening. Listening to the tales of the lives of the people, her writings were grounded in these grassroots, salt-of-the-earth stories and experiences of working people, of the poor, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. She strove to make history a living, moving entity in our lives. She once said that words should heat you, they should make you rise up out of your chair and move!
She led a colorful and vibrant life. As a young woman, she studied physical culture and drama in Chicago and New York City, and she plied her talent in the silent movies in California as a stunt woman. As a young activist she lived for a time in Emma Goldman’s commune in New York City. She wrote from and was part of the great social and political movements of her time. Her writing encompasses proletarian novels, widely anthologized short stories, partisan reportage, children’s books, personal journals, and powerful feminist poetry.
Her early works, in addition to profound working class consciousness, are also focused on the struggles of women, and particularly poor women, those sterilized without their consent in so-called mental hospitals, those on the breadlines, those whose lives and oppression more traditional leftwing ideologues did not comprehend.
Her children’s books found heroes and sheroes in US history and are especially noteworthy for their non-racist depiction of Native American peoples and cultures. Meridel believed her writing could be a bridge making connections across many different cultures. The diverse communities that identify with and celebrate her work are a moving testament to the depth and power of her writing.
Meridel saw Halley’s Comet twice, once when she was 10 years old and again when she was 85. We are certain that the impact of her work will be felt the next time Halley’s comes around….and the next… and the next….seven generations and more from today! Meridel’s life and writings testify to the profoundly democratic idea that positive social change always bubbles up—and sometimes erupts—from below. With Marx she would agree that to be radical means to go to the root of things—and at the root of things are the people themselves. She would enthusiastica
A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
Meridel LeSueur, North Star Country (1945)
Meridel LeSueur’s poetry, her short stories, and novels are a beloved part of the cultural and political fabric of our times. She was one of the great women literary and communal voices of the twentieth century, which her long life spanned. In describing her own roots Meridel wrote, “I was born at the beginning of the swiftest and bloodiest century at Murray, Iowa in a white square puritan house in the corn belt, of two physically beautiful people who had come west through the Indian and the Lincoln country, creating the new race of the Americas by enormous and rugged and gay matings with the Dutch, the Indian, the Irish; being preachers, abolitionists, agrarians, radical lawyers on the Lincoln, Illinois, circuit. Dissenters and democrats and radicals through five generations.”
Meridel was born on February 22, 1900, and she died in Hudson, Wisconsin on November 14, 1996. As a child she lived in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Minnesota. She believed in giving voice to people’s struggles. She said she learned early to write down what they were saying, hiding behind water troughs in the streets, under tables at home—listening. Listening to the tales of the lives of the people, her writings were grounded in these grassroots, salt-of-the-earth stories and experiences of working people, of the poor, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. She strove to make history a living, moving entity in our lives. She once said that words should heat you, they should make you rise up out of your chair and move!
She led a colorful and vibrant life. As a young woman, she studied physical culture and drama in Chicago and New York City, and she plied her talent in the silent movies in California as a stunt woman. As a young activist she lived for a time in Emma Goldman’s commune in New York City. She wrote from and was part of the great social and political movements of her time. Her writing encompasses proletarian novels, widely anthologized short stories, partisan reportage, children’s books, personal journals, and powerful feminist poetry.
Her early works, in addition to profound working class consciousness, are also focused on the struggles of women, and particularly poor women, those sterilized without their consent in so-called mental hospitals, those on the breadlines, those whose lives and oppression more traditional leftwing ideologues did not comprehend.
Her children’s books found heroes and sheroes in US history and are especially noteworthy for their non-racist depiction of Native American peoples and cultures. Meridel believed her writing could be a bridge making connections across many different cultures. The diverse communities that identify with and celebrate her work are a moving testament to the depth and power of her writing.
Meridel saw Halley’s Comet twice, once when she was 10 years old and again when she was 85. We are certain that the impact of her work will be felt the next time Halley’s comes around….and the next… and the next….seven generations and more from today! Meridel’s life and writings testify to the profoundly democratic idea that positive social change always bubbles up—and sometimes erupts—from below. With Marx she would agree that to be radical means to go to the root of things—and at the root of things are the people themselves. She would enthusiastica
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 20, 2019
North Star Country was an unusual read: it's a history and characterization of the Upper Midwest, but it's all very patched together and non-linear, and the writing often feels more like poetry than non-fiction. Often, excerpts from old newspapers are presented next to tall tales and folk sayings or accounts of the author's own travels.
Reading the first few sections feels like giving the region a big hug, and you really get a sense of the roots of the pride of the people of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. Of course, there's a lot of pain in that past as well, and it's not ignored here. All in all, what you get is a very thorough and honest portrait of the good and the bad that built the Upper Midwest up through 1945 when the book was published. A lot has changed since then, but the foundation Le Seuer describes is still here today.
I'm so glad I found this book when I did. So much of what I've learned from my nearly 4 years in Minnesota has been tied together here. I know this is a book I'll keep forever.
Reading the first few sections feels like giving the region a big hug, and you really get a sense of the roots of the pride of the people of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. Of course, there's a lot of pain in that past as well, and it's not ignored here. All in all, what you get is a very thorough and honest portrait of the good and the bad that built the Upper Midwest up through 1945 when the book was published. A lot has changed since then, but the foundation Le Seuer describes is still here today.
I'm so glad I found this book when I did. So much of what I've learned from my nearly 4 years in Minnesota has been tied together here. I know this is a book I'll keep forever.
March 30, 2020
This history of Minnesota and some of the surrounding region was written originally in 1945 by radical writer, Meridel Le Sueur. In it, she tells the story of Minnesota from the bottom up, somewhat reminiscent of the works of Howard Zinn (though he may have written his histories after this one). We hear of none of Minnesota's political leaders by name, and few of its business leaders; instead, we hear about the lives of workers, farmers, Native Americans, and others as they dealt with what history threw their way. It reads more like a novel, than a history book, but for those of us who have lived here in this state for many years, it gives a good picture of the social underpinnings of our state. A good history of Minnesota that tells its story in a new way, though the book was written about seventy years ago.
June 14, 2015
Part of a series American Folkways collecting the voices of America. Published 1945 by the WPA. Le Sueur retells what she heard in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Some of her oldest neighbors recounted their experiences of the American Civil War.
Read
July 1, 2020Mereidel Le Suer’s North Star Country is the history book I wish I had read in high school. Unlike so much of what we get in formative history books, both as teenagers and adults, Le Seur constructs a history through fragment and vignette rather than a broad-brush narrative. She weaves a history of Minnesota through stories told by settlers, lumbermen, Native Americans and industrialists, interspersing her own writing with poems, testimonies, songs and stories. Le Seur, part of the 1930’s proletarian literature movement, saw the world through the lens of common people, and saw immigration to this part of the country as the basis of a new kind of egalitarian and democratic society. The book is formed by stories of loss and life on the prairie, emphasizing the immensity of the work that citizens undertook and the swift destruction that could occur via disease, natural disaster, or the greed of railroad builders and other types of barons. Le Seur also writes at length about the plight of Native peoples, it reminded me a lot of the presentation we heard at the capitol a few weeks ago. The stories and statistics of the devastation of the original inhabitants of the North Star Country remain horrifying no matter how many times one encounters them. Le Seur concludes her book in the middle of the Depression, where she relates a vivid account of the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, and during the days the second world war, when young men from the prairie are dying and women, children, and the elderly power the industries of the area, form cooperatives, and band together in the spirit of the egalitarian that Le Seur envisioned as the Midwest’s great contribution to our society.
North Star Country, outside of its merit as an interesting folkway, struck me as important for a number of reasons. I loved the way that she creates a nonlinear history, it does us no favors to think of time and place as part of some march towards the inevitable present. Instead, Le Seur highlights moments in time where decisions were made, lives were lost, and new histories sprung up from the earth like the seeds and grains she memorializes in her book. She also creates histories written by, literally, ‘the folk’- the plains representation of the working class. While people like James Hill and the Weyerhaeuser are discussed, they are shown not to be some sort of paragons of the American spirit and industrious but, like everyone who finds themselves wealthy, they managed it through lies, exploitation and pure luck. Le Seur, writing in 1945, is already mourning a loss of a lifestyle and the destruction of the environment of the plains. 70 years later, her stories are almost shockingly familiar to us today. Despite a great promise of democracy and a culture that prioritizes fairness and responsibility to others, power remains consolidated in the hands of a few, who continue to dole out environmental damage to the Midwest and participate in unfair and discriminatory labor practices. And, just as the few retain disproportionate control over the resources of the many, as they did back in the day people today continue to stand and fight back against their oppressors. North Star Country reminds us of the twin strains of development present in Minnesota- both by cooperation and tremendous exertion on the part of the Native and the settler, and by greed and destruction on the part of the Gilded Age baron. It’s good to remember these stories, to think of the land, and to carry them with us as we seek to make change.
North Star Country, outside of its merit as an interesting folkway, struck me as important for a number of reasons. I loved the way that she creates a nonlinear history, it does us no favors to think of time and place as part of some march towards the inevitable present. Instead, Le Seur highlights moments in time where decisions were made, lives were lost, and new histories sprung up from the earth like the seeds and grains she memorializes in her book. She also creates histories written by, literally, ‘the folk’- the plains representation of the working class. While people like James Hill and the Weyerhaeuser are discussed, they are shown not to be some sort of paragons of the American spirit and industrious but, like everyone who finds themselves wealthy, they managed it through lies, exploitation and pure luck. Le Seur, writing in 1945, is already mourning a loss of a lifestyle and the destruction of the environment of the plains. 70 years later, her stories are almost shockingly familiar to us today. Despite a great promise of democracy and a culture that prioritizes fairness and responsibility to others, power remains consolidated in the hands of a few, who continue to dole out environmental damage to the Midwest and participate in unfair and discriminatory labor practices. And, just as the few retain disproportionate control over the resources of the many, as they did back in the day people today continue to stand and fight back against their oppressors. North Star Country reminds us of the twin strains of development present in Minnesota- both by cooperation and tremendous exertion on the part of the Native and the settler, and by greed and destruction on the part of the Gilded Age baron. It’s good to remember these stories, to think of the land, and to carry them with us as we seek to make change.
June 5, 2017
North Star Country, written in 1945 as part of a series of books about the different regions of the United States, is a history of the upper midwest: Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. The writing style is less like a history book, however, and more like a novel or a poem. And it's less a factual historical narrative than a collection of stories, folk tales, and legends. You get jokes about Paul Bunyan mixed in with stories about Abraham Lincoln with little to distinguish between them. You learn about the exploration of the great lakes, the fur trade, the Indian treaties and their broken promises, the arrival of settlers, farmers, lumberjacks, and the railroad, and ethnic clashes between German, Polish, and Scandinavian settlers, and the Midwestern ideal of plain-spoken, hard-working pragmatism. The writing is flowery and aspires to literature. And you'll have to check Wikipedia to know the locations she's writing about half the time, but I thoroughly enjoyed this read.
You get a sense of how quickly the midwest transitioned from wilderness to farmland. Today, we take it for granted that the midwest is a sleepy collection of farming towns, pejoratively known as flyover country, where the pace of life is slow and clothes are three to four years out of style. It's easy to forget that this region, closely associated with "traditional" and "conservative" America, is a relatively novel thing, and the change occurred in the space of a single lifetime.
Let's say you were born in 1820 and died in 1900. When you were born, there would not have been a road, farm, or any outpost of civilization beyond a handful of trading posts anywhere in Wisconsin. Green Bay would have been largest settlement, with a few dozen white traders coming and going. The rest was trees and Native Peoples, living as they had for the last thousand years. By the time you died in 1900, Wisconsin would look much as it does today, with farms, roads, railroads, and electricity. It was all very sudden.
“The heritage they give us is the belief we have in them. It is the story of their survival, the sum of adjustments, the struggle, the folk accumulation called sense and the faith we have in that collective experience. It was real and fast, and we enclose it . . . It is the deep from which we emerge.”
You get a sense of how quickly the midwest transitioned from wilderness to farmland. Today, we take it for granted that the midwest is a sleepy collection of farming towns, pejoratively known as flyover country, where the pace of life is slow and clothes are three to four years out of style. It's easy to forget that this region, closely associated with "traditional" and "conservative" America, is a relatively novel thing, and the change occurred in the space of a single lifetime.
Let's say you were born in 1820 and died in 1900. When you were born, there would not have been a road, farm, or any outpost of civilization beyond a handful of trading posts anywhere in Wisconsin. Green Bay would have been largest settlement, with a few dozen white traders coming and going. The rest was trees and Native Peoples, living as they had for the last thousand years. By the time you died in 1900, Wisconsin would look much as it does today, with farms, roads, railroads, and electricity. It was all very sudden.
“The heritage they give us is the belief we have in them. It is the story of their survival, the sum of adjustments, the struggle, the folk accumulation called sense and the faith we have in that collective experience. It was real and fast, and we enclose it . . . It is the deep from which we emerge.”
to-give-away
November 14, 2020Copyright 1945, Book Find Club Edition
First edition
First edition
August 18, 2008
Wow. When a book really floors me, all I can say is wow. Well maybe I can find a few more words: This is not a book, but rather a time machine. Not only is this "historian" lyrical like a poet, gripping like a storyteller, and lucid like a painter, but she quotes liberally from the most compelling minds of the various (alas, too few) eras she explores in this work. Just a masterpiece of Minnesota history. If you live in Minnesota, you must read this book.
July 19, 2014
I've never read a history quite like this one. Totally well researched but
more poetically prosy than chronological and straight forward.
A difficult read
more poetically prosy than chronological and straight forward.
A difficult read
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews