Rural

The common story that Americans tell about the country’s rural communities is one of nostalgia and decline. But that story misses so much about what rural life is really like. Rural America, Emily A. Prifogle insists, isn’t something that is dead or fading away. Instead, it is something that, across the twentieth century, was made and remade again—by residents and politicians, by workers and property owners, by lawyers and experts. Rural communities have been forced to adapt to and endure upon a national landscape increasingly dominated by suburban and urban communities and interests. Although many of the problems facing rural America were similar to those confronting cities or suburbs, they affected small communities in distinctly rural ways, shaped by physical and social geographies as well as economic and cultural forces.

Focusing on legal and political conflicts in the twentieth-century Midwest, Prifogle explains the remaking of modern rural America by weaving together multiple historical perspectives on rural change. She roots her analysis in specific individual communities for what they can tell us about rural education, migrant farm labor, rural infrastructure, access to justice, Native community resilience, and rural land use. The result is a new legal history that replaces a monolithic story of decline with many stories of a diverse rural Midwest in constant transformation.