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 ...

It’s dusk on a cool fall evening. As the sky darkens, a delighted audience of about 40 is treated to the cascading howls of wolves. Wailing in the far reaches of the red and gold forest around us are ...

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 ...

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 story is part of a series of travel-based dispatches from rural America. Click here to see other articles included in the series. WATFORD CITY – A decade ago, Watford City—a community of 6,000 in ...

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 ...

The slim, long-legged bobcat rested quietly in her leafy enclosure at the Ohio Wildlife Center, in rural Powell, Ohio. Occasionally she yawned, groomed her paws or walked along a thick branch ...

“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 ...