“If both rural and urban people have the same set of facts with which to express their concerns, perhaps they can reach common conclusions,” writes Gilles Stockton in his new book, Feeding a Divided ...

Dustin Watson looks over the pastures and woodlands he grew up on. Behind him is the farmhouse his great-grandfather built, not far from the chicken coops and tractor sheds his grandfather raised ...

Until recently, if you drove down the main street in Cairo, Illinois, a majority Black community at the southernmost point of the state, you wouldn’t have been able to find a grocery store. Like many ...

This is the second story in a two-part series on the public history of trees, centered on the essay collection Branching Out: The Public History of Trees. Read the first part here. Until the 20th ...

“You are forbidden to go to Old Hickory,” Brian Dempsey’s mother told him as a child in the Mississippi Delta. So, of course he went—though not right away. He describes Old Hickory as “an island of ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...

Thomas Tweed’s transformative new history, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press), begins and ends in the same place: a farm outside of Waco, Texas, where in ...

Since President Donald Trump took office, Kyla Bennett’s phone won’t stop ringing. Email, too, is flooding her devices. Every day—and sometimes through the night—Bennett is receiving urgent messages ...

In the mid 1980s, Thomas Eich’s grandparents, who farmed corn and soybeans, enrolled in the newly established Conservation Reserve Program, administered via the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ...

On a sunny day in late April, Barbara Damrosch, 83, stepped into boots and out the back door into the stone courtyard of her home in Brooksville, Maine. Thyme crept over the tidy rock pathways and ...

This past June, my best friend Henry and I decided to resume one of our oldest traditions: in times of transition, we like to drive to someplace new, usually with little more than a general ...

The following is the fifth installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and funded ...