New Books in the American West · New Books Network

Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)

September 3, 2025·36 min·3 clips

Dr. Flannery Burke reveals how Western authors invented their own idea of 'Back East,' flipping the script on American regional myths.

Back East is not fixed. Flannery explains how Chicago could become back East for people on the Great Plains, in the Rocky Mountains, or along the West Coast. The phrase depends on where someone starts. Miranda pauses there, letting the East and West feel less like settled places and more like habits of looking. Chicago matters because people moved through it and depended on it. Railroad lines, Route 66, and markets made the city feel like a starting point for many western lives. For someone in Seattle, Iowa, or Arizona in the highly mobile years after World War II, Chicago could look urban, moneyed, and powerful. The category keeps slipping around, which is the point. Flannery turns a familiar regional phrase into a map made from movement, markets, and imagined authority. Then the conversation gets more theoretical. Robert Park's marginal man thesis comes in through the book's argument about belonging and social position. Park had a rural background in Minnesota, and his work with the Chicago School of Sociology grew out of studies of ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Flannery describes Park's quintessential marginal man as Jewish, cosmopolitan, and set beside mainstream Christian American life. That reframes region as social judgment, not just location. The closing stretch links local life and cosmopolitanism to Hercules Jr. and the Lost Territory, with ties to UWC, Watrous, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Miranda keeps the pace patient, so the argument lands through examples instead of summary shortcuts.

As heard by us

A clear argument that East and West are matters of perspective, shaped by Chicago, rail, trade, and Robert Park's Chicago School lens.

Flannery Burke's conversation treats Back East as a matter of position, not a fixed map. From the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the West Coast, Chicago becomes the point that gives East and West their meaning.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a slow-burn history lesson about how regions get made.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from New Books in the American West