The first time I registered the term “flyover country,” my freshman year at a liberal arts college in Southern California, I was more bewildered than angry. I had grown up in Springfield, Illinois, population 117,000, and while I’d been eager to leave and explore the coasts, I’d never thought of the city with anything other than a sense of proprietary comfort. Yet here I was, aged 18, running into pervasive, indifferent dismissal. To the people doing the labeling, Springfield, the state capital, was no different than Peoria, population 115,000, and together these were just a few notches up from towns like Hettuck, Virden, Waverly, and Auburn, with populations ranging from 200 to 4,000, that dotted the Illinois countryside. Only Chicago shone out from flyover country’s dimly lit firmament: The city, people tended to say, that sounded pretty, but they’d never been.

My reflexive response to this attitude was to embrace the rhetoric of the “heartland,” the inverse of “flyover country,” in which the Midwest became the most exceptional place in America. This was a helpful if dishonest way to turn every critique of the region into a virtue, as in, “We may not have public transportation, but driving cars just makes us more self-sufficient!” Mine was not an uncommon reaction—the rhetorical war over the Midwest has been waging quietly for a hundred years, its earliest practitioners including Willa Cather (O Pioneers!), whose Nebraska plains produced solid citizens filled with romantic yearnings, and Sinclair Lewis (Main Street), whose small, smug Minnesota prairie towns stifled them. Eventually, I developed a more layered perspective, and I’d forgotten about my raw recognition of "flyover country" until recently. I remembered it because of a strange convergence, the release of three books making a case for the Midwest: novelist Diane Johnson’s Flyover Lives, a memoir of her childhood and her search, as an adult, for her roots; historian Jon K. Lauck’s The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History, which is partly an academic protest of historians’ implicit dismissal of the region, partly a raw cry of cultural neglect; and Ohio journalist and professor David Giffels’ The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt, reflections on the region's transformation from a center of postwar production into a case study of the ravages of the postindustrial economy.

I’m not exaggerating when I call this convergence of books strange. Unlike the South, the West and the Northeast, the Midwest is a chronically understudied area. These books try, with varying degrees of success, to the give the region its due, to define what, if anything, makes it unique. Each author has a richly detailed emotional understanding of different parts of the Midwest—rural Illinois for Johnson, South Dakota for Lauck, and rust belt Ohio for Giffels—and it’s this quality that consistently keeps their books absorbing. They describe the lingering appeal of a region that began as a rough, egalitarian frontier, came into its own during the Civil War by tilting the balance decisively towards the North, boomed thanks to the twentieth-century industrial economy and, after World War II, became increasingly connected with the rest of the country even as its economic viability diminished. Unlike many parts of the coasts, as well as the South and West where lax labor laws have attracted multinational corporations, the Midwest enjoys a degree of insulation from drastic changes. There’s still relatively little ethnic or religious diversity, there’s plenty of space to own land, prices aren’t too high, there’s not too much traffic congestion and, in an environment this familiar, people can afford to be friendly. For better or for worse, depending on who you ask, the region provides a gentle cushion against the pressures of twenty-first century America.

But the descriptiveness is lodged uncomfortably next to bursts of the aggressive regional boosterism I embraced for a while at college. The authors inflate their personal observations into broad, sentimental assertions about the region’s unique character, providing repeated examples of how the rhetoric of the heartland versus the coasts has infiltrated even thoughtful treatments of the subject. Midwesterners, in Lauck’s view, are especially egalitarian: He quotes Frederick Jackson Turner’s view of the region as a place where “pioneer ideals were at work and continued to sustain the American “‘faith in the destiny of the common man under freedom.’” For Giffels, Rust Belt survivors take “the hard way on purpose,” know that “the struggle is the only true freedom,” and are possessed of “a Calvinist instinct adapted into the genetic code by way of the repetition of a three-shift factory town.” For Johnson, “Looking at the Midwest of long-departed people and even my own childhood could remind of things people talk about as being missing in America today, and help remedy our apparent inability to learn from other cultures that might be doing things that if we did them too would restore the charm and goodness of our own society—trains, for example, and nice long vacations. Mom-and-pop restaurants!”

These are not satisfactory depictions of Midwestern reality, 70 years ago or today. They’re threads in a regional narrative suffused with nostalgia that doesn’t so much rescue flyover country from cultural neglect as raise questions about why it’s so widely sentimentalized—and why its modern complexities are elided by people—like Johnson, Lauck and Giffels—who should be most aware of them.