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 ...

On the main street of Republic, Washington, a community of about 1,000 near the Canadian border, the plain vertical façade of the town’s one-room public library belies the wealth of activity crammed ...

Here’s a piece of advice from someone raised in the coalfield mountains of southwest Virginia: We like to tell stories, and sometimes it takes a roundabout way to get to the point. What got this whole ...

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 ...

On the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, a dream died in 1890 in a brutal massacre. Today, 110 years later, on that same creek, a dream was born. That’s the work that Alex White Plume, traditional leader ...

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 ...

Last year, the Biden administration announced major climate goals: achieving a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and a net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. Twenty-nine states and ...

“If both rural and urban people have the same set of facts with which to express their concerns, perhaps they can reach common conclusions,” writes Gilles Stockton in his new book, Feeding a Divided ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the wake of the 2024 election, Barn Raiser talks to prominent Native leaders and mentors, who tell us in edited interviews how and why their communities have long endured, even in divisive and ...