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 ...

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 ...

International food aid—the food grown by American row crop farmers—has been a hallmark of United States foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. Its untimely end by the Trump administration ...

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

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 ...

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

The 1980s farm crisis was disaster for America’s family farmers and by extension the communities in which they lived. As land values that had boomed during the 1970s fell, farmers, saddled with debt, ...

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 ...

On the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, a dream died in 1890 in a brutal massacre. Today, 110 years later, on that same creek, a dream was born. That’s the work that Alex White Plume, traditional leader ...

It’s not likely that the word “overproduction” will feature much in this year’s farm bill debate. But in many ways, the status quo of overproducing corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton and a handful 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 ...

Old yellow school buses are a common sight in the summer parked along the flat, sandy farm fields in southern Delaware. They aren’t full of students, though. Stripped of their seats and windows, the ...