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 ...

I grew up on a dairy farm in the coalfields of Virginia. That meant Thanksgiving morning looked exactly like every other morning. You got up before daylight, walked out into the cold, and fed and ...

For the past half century, the Christian Right has been mastering the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and end it. The methods and the players have evolved over time, but the goal of ...

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays centered around food. Families gather around full tables, share familiar dishes and express gratitude for the hands that produced them. Being thankful is ...

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 ...

The following is the first installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...

Until recently, if you drove down the main street in Cairo, Illinois, a majority Black community at the southernmost point of the state, you wouldn’t have been able to find a grocery store. Like many ...

It’s not likely that the word “overproduction” will feature much in this year’s farm bill debate. But in many ways, the status quo of overproducing corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton and a handful of ...

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 ...

The election results reported in this story were updated on December 4, 2024, when the last House race, in California’s 13th Congressional District, was called. Donald Trump was elected the nation’s ...

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 ...