They were the radical farmers and laborers who formed the backbone of the People’s Party and later the Socialist Party in the southwest. Their rise and decline as grassroots critics of both major ...

“Can plants talk? Well, now they can! All you need is your phone,” Cherokee elder Tony Harris tells children visiting the Cherokee Garden at Green Meadows Preserve, in Marietta, Georgia. With ...

Farmers are searching for immigration reform like a lost desert wanderer scanning the horizon for water. But the oasis always turns out to be a mirage. Will this finally be the year for meaningful ...

For much of the 20th century, rural and urban voters often aligned in their support for presidential candidates. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected, rural and urban residents voted within one ...

In March 2025, the Trump administration abruptly froze more than $1 billion in funds for local food purchasing programs, dealing a major blow to the schools, food banks and tribal communities who ...

A version of this story first appeared in The Iowa Mercury. Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms. The ...

Wendell Berry, in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, saw in American history a constant tension between the honest struggle of family farmers (like his own) and ...

Between 2003 and 2019, the United States lost half of its dairy farms. For several decades, dairy farmers across the country have seen their livelihoods vanish as a result of low prices, farm ...

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 ...