Things have been looking up for the Democrats after this year’s elections. In Virginia, where I live, the headline in November was the governor’s race, where former U.S. Rep. and CIA officer Abigail ...

When Suzan Erem reached out to Barn Raiser in July, she thought she was only writing a letter to the editors. “While Iowa’s Republican administration brags of a budget surplus (hoarded from the Biden ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...