I wish every reader a happy Wednesday, and to my Christian readers, a productively mournful Ash Wednesday and Lent season. Two quick announcements. One, my review of Jon K. Lauck’s history of the nineteenth-century Midwest is up at New Republic, where it benefits immeasurably from the editorial interventions of Laura Marsh. (I’m not being ironic; she made it a lot better.) I am critical of the book in ways that anyone who’s read a bit of JKL and a bit of me could more or less predict; I wish there were an artful and unexpected way around that, but sometimes there isn’t one. Equally, I hope readers won’t take my opening encomium to Lauck’s work as me being merely politic. I put myself in debt to him, among other historians, when I wrote