History

Country Queers Spread the Love in Rural America

Rae Garringer’s new book documents more than a decade of LGBTQ+ rural life

Detectorists Find More Than What’s Underground

Relic hunters build comradery by uncovering history in rural Pennsylvania

Land of Liberty

Myth-making in the early American republic

Federal Courts Sentence Native Americans to Longer Prison Terms

How federal authority over tribes fails to provide equal justice under the law

How the ’70s Counterculture Shaped My Ozark Childhood

Going back-to-the-land meant confronting my family's, and our nation's, fraught racial history

Jim Hightower Confronts the 1980s Farm Crisis

"It's the same old story—Reagan helps the rich, and Lord help the rest of us."

Pioneer Letitia Carson Escaped Slavery to Became One of Oregon’s First Farmers

Racial justice advocates work to memorialize the historic homestead of Letitia and her white husband David Carson
Jaclyn Moyer, High Country News
Keep an Independent Mind

Sign up to receive twice-weekly Barn Raiser updates on original, independent reporting from rural and small town America.

mail
History
August 24, 2023

The Forgotten Victims Downwind of Oppenheimer’s Bomb

How popular narratives obscure the victims of America's first dirty bomb.

Joshua Wheeler, photography by Reto Sterchi
History
August 16, 2023

The Great Spirit (Why I am a Pagan)

Zitkála-Šá, born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in 1876, embraces the religion of her ancestors

Native Life
August 9, 2023

Will a Century-Old Doctrine Help Preserve Tribal Water Rights in the West?

“While Indian tribes have to determine their water rights for the rest of their future, our cities, towns and counties don’t.”

Scott King, Sierra Nevada Ally