Michael Batinski has written a double-barreled historiography of Jackson County, Illinois, which pairs an analysis of the traditional male and white-centric narrative with a “from the bottom up” narrative. This makes it a compelling exploration of the problems of local history. Forgetting and the Forgotten presents a historiography of a Jeffersonian tale of progress by white folk who conquered and cultivated the wilderness to create a yeoman farmer democracy. The texts of these tales are mostly found in what Batinski describes as “gilt-covered histories found on parlor tables.” Those accounts are contested by his historiography of inclusion. In these accounts, Batinski voices the forgotten and suppressed stories of the twelfth- to fifteenth-century Mississippian people and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Algonquian-speaking people. He writes of those who failed in their settlement efforts and moved on; of those People of Color who drifted into the county as laborers, some of whom were...
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