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Soy plantation fields.

Hating the Heartland

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

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

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.
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.
JFK accompanies a man and woman walking through the wreckage of a tornado.
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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?
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How our Appetite for Cheap Food Drove Rural America to Trump

Consumer demand and government policy decimated rural America.
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.
Day laborer pumping up tire on tractor on large farm near Ralls, Texas, 1939.
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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.
George Eliot

“As If You Was a Insect”

George Eliot refused to stereotype the rural working class. Her outlook would serve us well today.
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.
Willa Cather wearing a mink shawl and a large hat in Paris

Prairie Swooner

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.
Black tenant farmers working in a field
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Some pumpkins.

Ain't I Some Pumpkins?

Soon after he was elected, Abraham Lincoln received a rather bizarre letter.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake holds a news conference as she tours the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 4 in Sierra Vista, Ariz.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Henry Holt, a farmer near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in 1937, who was moved off land by the Resettlement Administration.

How the Government Helped White Americans Steal Black Farmland

There was once a thriving Black middle class based on farm ownership. But during the twentieth century, the USDA helped erase that source of wealth.
Advertisment for 1947 performance by singers and musicians Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong

Did the Blues Originate in New Orleans?

Something unusual happened in New Orleans music around 1895. Was it the birth of the blues?
At the filling station and garage at Pie Town, New Mexico, in October 1940. Photo by Russell Lee, FSA/Library of Congress.

Cowboy Progressives

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed.

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