Part I. Pioneer period : Early institutions and problems -- Military bounty lands and the origins of the public domain / Rudolf Freund -- Agrarian discontent in the Mississippi Valley preceding the War of 1812 / George Rogers Taylor -- Part II. Travails and hopes : Social life -- Patent-Office models of the good society : Some relationships between social reform and westward expansion / Arthur E. Bestor, Jr. -- Social relationships in Trempealeau County / Merle Curti -- Disease and sickness on the Wisconsin frontier : Cholera / Peter T. Harstad -- Part III. The land and its plenty -- Farming in the Prairie Peninsula, 1830-1890 / Allan G. Bogue -- The dairy industry in Ohio prior to the Civil War / Robert Leslie Jones -- Part IV. The urban dimension -- Urban life in western America, 1790-1830 / Richard C. Wade -- Urban rivalrey and internal improvements in the Old Northwest, 1820-1860 / Harry N. Scheiber -- Part V. The people- moving -- Who were the lumberjacks? / George B. Engberg -- Restless Grant County : Americans on the move / Peter J. Coleman -- Part VI. Government and politics -- The antislavery movement in Illinois, 1824-1835 / Merton Lynn Dillon -- Agrarian radicalism in Illinois' Constitutional Convention of 1862 / Stanley L. Jones -- Middle western Copperheadism and the genesis of the Granger Movement / Frank L. Klement -- The origin and early development of the Wisconsin idea / Vernon Carstensen -- Part VII. The tensions of industrialization -- The workers' search for power : Labor in the Gilded Age / Herbert G. Gutman.