Rural: A History of Change

There is a common story that Americans tell about modern rural America. It’s a nostalgic story of decline and imminent death. This book doesn’t tell that history. Instead, it tells many histories and explores the process of making and remaking rural identity and rural communities through legal and political conflicts in the twentieth-century Midwest.

Rural communities were forced to adapt to and endure upon a national landscape that was literally and figuratively dominated by suburban and urban communities and interests. Although many legal and policy contests involved issues similarly experienced by non-rural communities, the common challenges were distinctly shaped by rural geographies, social contexts, and mythmaking.

Prifogle explains the remaking of modern rural America by weaving together multiple historical perspectives on rural change. Always remaining rooted in individual rural communities, she investigates issues of rural education, migrant farm labor, rural infrastructure, Native community resilience, rural land use and more. Attentive to how cultural stories about rural decline shaped perceptions, Prifogle argues instead that the rural is something that is actively constructed—made and remade again—by rural residents, state actors, legal structures, and broader cultural forces.