I suppose everyone who has ever lived into their 90s has found the world they still inhabit confusing and at times unknowable. An ancestral aunt of mine, Mary Barker, was born in Newbury, England, in ...

In his memoir, the author courageously shares his story, in particular, his dad’s story and his struggles keeping the dairy farm in Canaseraga, a rural town in Upstate New York. It is a story of ...

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 ...

For the first time in l00 years the Klamath River is dam free. For thousands of years the Klamath—winding 257 miles from the volcanic Cascade Range in southern Oregon to where it meets the Pacific ...

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 ...

There was a time when Iowa mattered. From 1972 to 2020, we hosted the first-in-the-nation caucuses, despite a population that is overwhelmingly white and unabashedly rural. Every four years, the ...

“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 ...

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 ...

The first announcement arrived in the mailbox outside my faculty apartment in early May. Inside a small white envelope was a card that read Congratulations, Class of 2012! It was covered with photos ...

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 ...