Lauren Bruce gives us a more informed description of one of the states currently at the center of the Democratic nomination contest:
Despite the portrayal of my home state as a white wasteland, Indiana has a long, compelling history of competing ideas and interests. Yes, it was a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan, but it also had several integral stops on the Underground Railroad. The state housed some of the first utopian societies in the United States, and boasts an internationally known center for modern Quaker society. Indiana was home to Eugene Debs, Socialist party presidential candidate in the early 1900s and one of the founders of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World. Today the workforce is heavily based in manufacturing, more so than in agriculture, and as such is heavily unionized. Where Indiana was once largely a white state infamous for its “sundown towns,” the African-American and Latino populations are growing exponentially, and within the last decade the university in my backyard hosted among the largest percentages of foreign students in the United States. But somehow, whenever an outsider writes about Indiana, it's all corn, religion, white supremacists, pickup trucks, and, goddamn it, basketball.
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--The Editors
