When Kristin Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the D.C. metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home isolated and provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form—or so we have been taught to believe. Struck by the gap between reputation and reality, Hoganson uncovered the making of the modern heartland, a crossroads of people, commerce, and ideas. As she tells the individual stories of the everyday people of the region, Hoganson reveals their pressing preoccupations, among them identity and community, immigration and trade, and security and global power.