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Rural History



  • What Has the Trump Era Done to Wendell Berry?

    "The Need to Be Whole once again considers the question that Berry has spent his entire life contemplating: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs?" A reviewer doesn't think his latest work succeeds. 



  • How Powerful Stories are Rebuilding a Church

    by Deborah Fallows

    "The stories of Mt. Holly have become the sinew that could connect the town, or borough, as it is officially designated, from its past glory days, through some recent decline, to a new version of thriving."


  • Powerline Politics in the 1970s and Today

    by Tyler Priest

    Environmental activists have forged anti-pipeline alliances with rural landowners using the issue of eminent domain. History shows that this might boomerang if farmers oppose the new electric transmission lines that will be needed to implement green electrification. 



  • Left Behind: The Trouble with Euphemism

    by Nancy Isenberg

    A historian of white rural poverty says that the cultural phenomenon of JD Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy" is just the latest deployment of the "left behind" euphemism to obscure the nature of poverty in the United States. The rural poor are and have been part and parcel of the American economic order.



  • Baseball History and Rural America

    The study of how baseball evolved, historain David Vaught writes, remains a test of how history is written--from concern with origin moments or attention to ongoing processes of change and development.