rural America — Bunk History

How America Invented the Red State

According to conventional wisdom, the last quarter century of elections has proved that most of the country leans conservative. It all started with a map.

by Tarence Ray via The Nation on December 17, 2024

Soy plantation fields.

Hating the Heartland

Do Americans in rural places really “marinate in a sense of loss and perpetual disappointment”?

by Paul Schwenessen via Law & Liberty on May 29, 2024

Couriers’ duties included fetching patients from cabins, weighing babies, delivering medicine, cleaning saddles and bridles, and escorting any guests who rode the routes between FNS outposts.

Why Debutantes Volunteered to Be Horse-Riding Couriers in Rural Kentucky

Between the 1920s and 1940s, wealthy young women signed up to run errands and carry messages for the Frontier Nursing Service.

by Eliza McGraw via Smithsonian on March 28, 2024

Grant Wood’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Byron McKeeby, stand by the painting for which they had posed, “American Gothic.”

Beyond the Myth of Rural America

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on October 16, 2023

A Coal miner, his wife and two of their children in Bertha Hill, West Virginia, September 1938.

How Black Folks Have Built Resilient Spaces for Themselves in US Mountains

Did you know that there was a hidden utopia of formerly enslaved people located in the mountains of Appalachia?

by Cameron Oglesby via Earth In Color on February 1, 2023

TV's Rural Craze & The Civil Rights Movement

At the same time that MLK was using TV to brand Southern sheriffs as obstacles to progress, a Southern sheriff was one of the medium's most beloved characters.

by Bijan Bayne via RogerEbert.com on June 21, 2022

A school bus travels along a dirt road outside Cuba, N.M., in October.

For More Than a Century, Policymakers Have Mishandled Rural Schools

Consolidation aimed to bring cutting-edge reforms to rural schools. Instead, it hurt kids and communities.

by Paul Theobald via Made By History on August 19, 2021

Baseball History and Rural America

Baseball's creation myth is bunk, and historians have shown how important cities were to the game's development. But it was still a rural passion.

by Peter Feueherd, David Vaught via JSTOR Daily on May 18, 2020

Farmers haying.

Remembering the ‘Spooky Wisdom’ of Our Agrarian Past

For millennia, humans have followed specific patterns passed down by their forbears without always knowing why.

by Gracy Olmstead via The American Conservative on April 23, 2018

JFK accompanies a man and woman walking through the wreckage of a tornado.

How Farmers Convinced Scientists to Take Climate Change Seriously

Rural Americans once led the fight to link extreme weather like Hurricane Harvey and human activity. What changed?

by Justin McBrien via Made By History on August 27, 2017

How our Appetite for Cheap Food Drove Rural America to Trump

Consumer demand and government policy decimated rural America.

by Benjamin Davison via Made By History on June 30, 2017

Can the Rodeo Save a Historic Black Town?

One woman’s quest to rescue Boley, Oklahoma.

by Caleb Gayle via The Atlantic on December 17, 2024

A boarded-up food center.

The Great Grocery Squeeze

How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.

by Stacy Mitchell via The Atlantic on December 1, 2024

Deserted turnpike on tribal land.

How a Small Town Murder in Oklahoma Sparked a Supreme Court Battle Over Tribal Sovereignty

On the independence of the Muscogee Nation.

by Rebecca Nagle via Literary Hub on September 10, 2024

Day laborer pumping up tire on tractor on large farm near Ralls, Texas, 1939.

Stories of the Land: Diverse Agricultural Histories in the U.S.

An exhibit featuring public radio and television programs broadcast over 65 years that explore American agricultural life.

by Mariah E. Marsden via American Archive of Public Broadcasting on July 29, 2024

George Eliot

“As If You Was a Insect”

George Eliot refused to stereotype the rural working class. Her outlook would serve us well today.

by Matthew Karp via Harper’s on April 26, 2024

A large crowd listening to Harry Truman give a speech on a train.

Harry Truman's Train Ride

A whistle-stop train tour, and some plain speaking spur Harry Truman's come from behind win in 1948 over Thomas Dewey.

by Michael Liss via 3 Quarks Daily on March 25, 2024

Willa Cather wearing a mink shawl and a large hat in Paris

Prairie Swooner

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.

by Eric Banks via Bookforum on February 6, 2024

Black tenant farmers working in a field

Rural Black Land Loss Has Been a Problem for Seven Decades

Even as the civil rights revolution brought significant gains to Black residents of cities, the story was very different in rural places.

by Ansley L. Quiros, Allie R. Lopez via Made By History on December 17, 2023

Farmers on a tractor harvesting grain.

Rural America Has Lost Its Soul

Jefferson's vision of the family farm is a myth that won't die.

by Steven Conn via UnHerd on November 27, 2023

Willa Cather sitting on a bench, wearing a fur scarf and feathered hat and looking at the camera

Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.

by Benjamin Taylor via Literary Hub on November 15, 2023

Small homesteading cabin in the desert.

“Jackrabbiting” Away from Urban Spaces

Seeking rural solitude, urban Southern Californians ventured into the Mojave Desert, armed with pickaxes and dreams but facing harsh landscapes and red tape.

by Julie Haltom via The Metropole on August 29, 2023

Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass and the “Faithful Little Band of Abolitionists” in Uxbridge, Massachusetts

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

by C. J. Martin via Commonplace on June 6, 2023

Ferris wheel at the Chicago World Fair of 1893.

The Magic Lantern Man

At every stop, he enthralled audiences with a device called a “stereopticon.”

by David Cecelski via David Cecelski.com on May 1, 2023

The men of the Dawahares family, a Syrian immigrant family who founded a clothing business in Kentucky.

Moses of Cairo (Illinois)

The idea that non-white immigrants are, generally speaking, new to the Midwest could not be further from the truth.

by Edward E. Curtis IV via Belt Magazine on April 23, 2023

Some pumpkins.

Ain't I Some Pumpkins?

Soon after he was elected, Abraham Lincoln received a rather bizarre letter.

by Bill Black via Contingent on February 27, 2023

Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake holds a news conference as she tours the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 4 in Sierra Vista, Ariz.

Cochise County Didn’t Used To Be the Land Of Far Right Stunts

How the rural Arizona border county embodies the political shift in much of America.

by Katherine Benton-Cohen via Made By History on December 2, 2022

William Barber III standing in front of Vera Brown Farm.

Rebuilding the Homestead

How Black landowners in eastern North Carolina are recovering generational wealth lost to industry encroachment.

by Cameron Oglesby via The Margin on October 25, 2022

1928 painting of a girl getting baptized in a pool, surrounded by a crowd on a farm.

Trouble in River City

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

by Caroline Fraser via New York Review of Books on September 29, 2022

Photo of Ella May Wiggins' five children.

The 1929 Loray Mill Strike Was a Landmark Working-Class Struggle in the US South

Murdered during the 1929 Loray Mill strike, Ella May Wiggins became a working-class martyr—and a symbol of labor’s fight to democratize the anti-union South.

by Karen Sieber via Jacobin on September 14, 2022

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