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 ...

In 1874, Jupiter Gilliard, who had been enslaved before emancipation, purchased 476 acres of coastal Georgia soil near rural Brunswick. That act of ownership rooted his descendants in the land they ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Visit a dairy farm anywhere in the country and odds are decent you’ll overhear conversations in Spanish. Like other farmers in the United States, dairy farmers rely on immigrant laborers from Mexico ...

The following is an excerpt from Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, published by Island Press. You can purchase a copy here. Brenda ...

In March, following President Donald Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, the United States’ largest trading partners, and anticipating Trump’s April 2 announcement of a ...

On the day of his inauguration, President Donald Trump claimed his administration would end the “censorship of protected speech.” But actions speak louder than words. Thanks to a leaked email memo, we ...

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 ...

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