Nostalgia is the beating heart of the Trump movement. From fears of DEI displacing whites to the rise of so-called “trad wives” wanting to replicate what they see as traditional notions of motherhood under patriarchal households, nostalgia for a supposedly lost past drives much of Trump’s appeal. Large parts of the working class, furious that its historical right to hard, masculine work has disappeared, has also embraced Trumpist nostalgia. Decades of industrial job loss and a lack of answers for displaced workers about the future has turned the blue-collar counties that made up the core of the New Deal Coalition into Trump havens. The media has largely focused on industrial factory cities in swing states, but its impact in natural resource counties has been just as transformative.

Addressing Trumpism is not the stated goal of Willa Hammitt Brown’s outstanding Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack, but I could not read it without processing it through our current moment. Narratives of the past shift to serve the interest of powerful memory creators. Brown notes how quickly media narratives about Trump’s January 6 coup attempt changed for the interests of the Republican Party. Her case study on late-19th-century logging in the Great Lakes demonstrates clear understanding of how nostalgia erases truth and creates palatable visions of the past that allow contemporary people to forget hardships and exploitation, settling for a vision of the past that seems simpler than today’s difficulties. By erasing histories of working-class exploitation, environmental degradation, and settler colonialism, the official tourist industry of the Northwoods tells a story that fits right into a Trumpist narrative about what America used to be and what it could be if made great again.

Although Brown deeply loves her Northwoods home, she pulls no punches on what built its modern iteration. The timber industry rests upon the appropriation of Menominee and Anishinaabe land, part of the larger settler colonialist project. It exploded after the Civil War, built on unmitigated and uncontrolled environmental destruction and labor exploitation. Post–Civil War America had an insatiable demand for timber, and the Northwoods provided much of it until its almost total deforestation within two decades. Neither large capital, employers, nor workers saw any value in the forest itself, and they saw its elimination as a sign of progress. Irresponsible forestry led to massive fires that devastated many of these communities in the early 20th century.

Loggers lived a hard, brutal existence. The dangerous work led to grievous injury and death. Even loggers who survived could rarely labor in the industry for more than 20 years. The work’s itinerant nature meant that many loggers did not marry or live the lives of restrained manhood so valued by Victorian era commenters. Instead, they created masculine work and social cultures that valued their own hierarchies, often based around violence. Violence became a way to enforce safety from untrained greenhorns who threatened veteran loggers through their ignorance. Violence also enforced racial hierarchies, both against Scandinavian immigrants and Native American workers. Men on the far edges of a rough-and-tumble system of unregulated capitalism felt they needed violence to protect themselves, create community, and make a life.

With reputations as violent, itinerant men, loggers were hardly welcomed by local residents when they arrived in town. In a chapter reminiscent of how people talk about the homelessness crisis, Brown explores how “respectable” Northwoods residents pathologized the loggers’ lives, seeing them as threats to domesticity, and wishing to move them on as quickly as possible. Labor historians would like to see histories of organizing here, but other than a brief attempt by the Industrial Workers of the World to organize these workers in 1916, they showed little coordinated political activity. Their forms of resistance consisted of walking off the job or letting out their frustrations through brawling. Labor historians have recently begun to pay more attention to workers who do not organize and can explain much about the working class through these studies; Brown adds significantly to this conversation.

Meanwhile, lumber barons such as Frederick Weyerhaeuser grew wealthy on the backs of these workers. They built palatial homes in cities such as St. Paul. When the timber began to run out at the end of the 19th century, most of the loggers were out of luck. But Weyerhaeuser simply moved operations to the enormous forests of the Pacific Northwest, after he bought 900,000 acres of virgin southwest Washington timber from his fellow Minnesota capitalist, the railroad baron James J. Hill, in 1900. Once again, the cycle of environmental and labor exploitation would begin, with much of the same labor violence and long-term damage to the ecosystem.

Current Issue

October 2026 Issue

Brown shows as much interest in how memory is created and the stories we tell about the past as she does about the workers themselves. The Paul Bunyan character was a creation of corporate leaders, allowing for the retelling of history to erase the environmental tragedy and brutality inflicted on workers. Growing up in the Northwoods, she noted how business and political leaders created historical tales of rugged men conquering the wilderness, completely manufacturing convenient half-truths for generations of residents of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Moreover, this memory recreates the manly lifestyle for modern consumers as it does the cowboy—dangerous but filled with adventure, violent but with a moral center based around restraint.

Teaching sanitized versions of past work led working-class people to compare what they hear to their current work life. With jobs in the timber industry a fraction of what they were a half-century ago, it’s hardly surprising that workers would embrace a narrative of making America great again through hard work. I grew up in the woods of Oregon and Washington instead of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but the stories Brown tells match strongly with what I have seen in the Northwest, where timber counties threaten to leave Oregon to create a “Greater Idaho” to get away from the liberals in Portland and Eugene, driven by a desire to return to the era of men cutting down trees to build America.

Nostalgia sells people on a past that never really existed, one that seems so much simpler than the present. But will historians exist in the future to provide the stories Americans need to hear? Brown is not employed as a professor. At the same moment that Americans desperately need these stories, the neoliberal university system has slashed funding for humanities departments. Tenure-track jobs in the field have collapsed since the Great Recession. This is as true in blue states as in red states, as the corporate donors who run the universities seek to turn our higher education system into nothing more than a job training program, with administrators happy to comply.

Willa Hammitt Brown, and her important book, demonstrates why we must demand universities require the study of history. We need more stories from her and hundreds of other unemployed and underemployed historians encouraging us to reject nostalgia and deal with the legacies of labor exploitation, environmental degradation, settler colonialism, and the stories that cover it all.