“Historians are shockingly dismissive of people in ‘flyover country,’ ” says Pulitzer-winning historian T. J. Stiles

Not long ago, T.J. Stiles was walking beside Lake Mille Lacs when he came across a historical marker. It said the area was the site of a large Sioux village as recently as 300 years ago, a fascinating fact for a place not at all associated with the Dakota Sioux people today.

Stiles had grown up an hour away, with a sense that the region held no history worth knowing about. “We were living in buildings built in the 1940s in a town founded in the 19th century by a railroad that wasn’t even there anymore,” he says. “I didn’t think it was a very impressive place.”

But he has come to understand, better than anyone else, how wrong he was. Since 2002, he has published three major historical biographies that have earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award — a near-perfect literary batting average. His 2016 Pulitzer, for Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (Knopf), made him the youngest living historian to have twice earned the prize, in the company of Robert Caro and David McCullough. And much of his writing has vindicated America’s mid-section.

“Historians are shockingly dismissive of people in ‘flyover country,’” Stiles says. They doubted that Jesse James, the Missouri farmer-turned-outlaw and the subject of Stiles’ first biography, cared about politics — though the evidence was easy to see. They doubted that General George Custer, who spent a lot of time in St. Paul and traveled through Brainerd on his way out West, could signify anything but epic hubris — though he encapsulates a certain white American angst after the Civil War. ...