STOCKTON — Stockton Heritage Museum will host a presentation by Illinois Rhodes Scholar Cynthia Clampitt on the history of corn and the changes it brought to early America and the Midwest we know today. 

The presentation, “How Corn Changed Itself and Then Changed Everything Else,” will take place at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 4 at the Stockton Heritage Museum, 107 West Front Street, Stockton. The event is free and open to all audiences.

In this lecture, Clampitt will present the history of corn and how it transformed the Americas before first contact, how it traveled the world after European first contact, and its stunning impact on the creation of not only the historic Midwest but just about everything in it. 

About 10,000 years ago, a weedy grass that grew in Mexico and possessed a strange trait known as a “jumping gene” transformed itself into a larger and more useful grass — the cereal grass that we would come to know as maize and then corn.

Most textbooks only mention corn in the context of rescuing a few early settlers, but it in fact sustained the colonies and then the early United States. Corn virtually created the Midwest, a region that settled faster than any other region in history. It also created the region’s cities, especially Chicago, where everything from grain elevators, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the 1893 World’s Fair to time zones and the stockyards were made possible by the golden flood flowing into the city.

Clampitt has been writing and talking about food history for 30 years and has authored two books of food history.

Clampitt has pursued her love of culture, history, and food in 37 countries on six continents, but has in recent years increasingly focused on the American Midwest. She has written textbooks for every major educational publisher in the U.S., including the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and National Geographic Learning. Clampitt is a member of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, the Society of Women Geographers, the Agricultural History Society, and the Midwestern History Association. 

For more information, go to www.

stocktonheritagemuseum.org, on  Facebook: Stockton-Heritage-Museum-309324911534, email: info@stocktonheritagemuseum.org, or leave a message at 815-947-2220.