Sheriffs walk a thin line between law and legend. Throughout rural America, sheriffs oversee most of law enforcement. Yet in the American cultural imagination, sheriffs are also the subjects of tall ...

The morning after the U.S. bombed Iran on June 22, I visited the megachurch that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth once attended in Lino Lakes, Minnesota. Hegseth is an outspoken Christian Nationalist ...

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 ...

Anna Sekine works as the Midwest Farmland Associate at American Farmland Trust. In this role, she supports programs focused on farmland protection, next-generation land access, and farm transfer ...

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 ...

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 ...

Visit a dairy farm anywhere in the country and odds are decent you’ll overhear conversations in Spanish. Like other farmers in the United States, dairy farmers rely on immigrant laborers from Mexico ...

The following is an excerpt from Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, published by Island Press. You can purchase a copy here. Brenda ...

In March, following President Donald Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, the United States’ largest trading partners, and anticipating Trump’s April 2 announcement of a ...

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 ...

In another blow to farmers and rural communities, on March 7 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) abruptly froze more than $1 billion in funds for programs that gave schools and food banks money ...