In the mid 1980s, Thomas Eich’s grandparents, who farmed corn and soybeans, enrolled in the newly established Conservation Reserve Program, administered via the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ...

“Rural people know inherently what it means to be a good neighbor,” Lynlee Thorne says over the phone from her farm in Rockingham County, Virginia. It is late August, the week following the Democratic ...

All too often, rural America is neglected by candidates at the top of the ticket. And when those candidates do the token farm stop, they often hit on a handful of tired messages about feeding the ...

In the section titled, “Every Holler Has A Creature,” Muncy and Schultz explore Appalachia’s “holler life” through several stories they have collected over their research. In its most narrow ...

Benton Harbor, Mich.—Abandoned houses, time-worn homes and nicely kept houses fronted by costly cars. Cracked sidewalks. Forgotten, dusty yards and grassy well-trimmed lawns. The poor and very poor ...

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The rural vote is vital on November 5. Even a small shift in the electoral margins of rural counties could determine the outcome of the presidential election in battleground states. Down ballot, the ...

The Jersey Devil, or Leeds Devil, has been an important figure in American folklore for over two centuries. Encounters with the Devil have been recorded in legends as varied as one featuring the 19th ...

Since 1964, I have consistently voted for third-party candidates in presidential elections—but not this time. This year, I am tossing my political purity and sanctimony out the window and voting for ...

In late 1966, residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, began reporting encounters with a six- or seven-foot tall creature with glowing eyes and large wings. Local papers dubbed it the “Mothman,” ...

On a recent October morning, Guy Reiter and a dozen other citizens of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin set up a table at a community meal intended to celebrate their culture, heritage and ...

It was August 2022. The lush indolence of late summer in Minnesota had given way to fevered anxiety over the state’s midterm elections. Tim Walz, the Democratic governor, was running for re-election ...