Former Kansas City Star columnist Bill Tammeus takes a Fourth of July week look at how our nation has been shaped by people he calls “Middle Americans” – citizens who came after the so-called “Greatest Generation” and who were often born in the Midwest.

Drawing on his new book, Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans, Tammeus will point to what we can celebrate about the achievements of Midwesterners and to what they haven’t done so well. Midwesterners contributed to — and accommodated themselves to — astonishing change in the last 70-plus years. But what legacy are they leaving in such areas as race relations, politics, economics, and the question of confidence in our public and private institutions?