Tag: Great Divide
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Why Don’t Country People Just Get Out? – Episode 3
It’s happened again. Writers in The New York Times are once again wondering aloud if country people shouldn’t just give up and move to the city to deal with problems of economic insecurity. Which means, it’s time for another episode of “Why Don’t Country People Just Get Out?” In an article titled “The Hard Truth…
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Love and Grit in What Used to Be America: Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland
This used to be America. This rural landscape I walk through, drive through, every day is what American dreamers used to look to as the source of our national ideals. Field workers and farmers were the backbone of our strength. “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass…
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#3 Heartlands Best Reads of 2018: Amity and Prosperity
The changing landscape of rural America. Big economic forces impacting big-hearted, sympathetic characters. New ways to look at the Great Divide. Interesting places and hints of God. Great writing. These are the things that make for a great Heartlands Read. Throw in fracking and you’ve got Eliza Griswold’s gripping and sometimes-terrifying book, Amity & Prosperity: One…
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#6 Heartlands Best Reads of 2018: Heartland
Yes, Sarah Smarsh was clearly making a shameless bid for a Top Ten spot on the Heartlands list with the title of her memoir: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. But the editorial staff here at Heartlands can’t be won over by gimmicks. It takes good writing to…
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How to Get Over the Election – 2018 Edition
We went to the polls. We voted for change or not. We resisted or didn’t. And in the end, we remain divided. One pundit I heard this morning said that the most profound and confounding divide in America is the rural-urban/suburban split. As a site begun after the 2016 elections and devoted to understanding the…
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Fracking & A Fractured Land
The Washington County Fair in 2010 should have been unalloyed joy for Stacey Haney and her family. After all, Haney’s 14-year-old son, Harley, and his goat, Boots, took the Grand Champion Showmanship award. Paige, her 11-year-old daughter, got awards for her two rabbits, Pepsi & Phantom, and for her Mexi-SPAM Mac and Cheese entry in…
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Normal is How America Got This Way: A Review of The View from Flyover Country
“The absence of complaining should be taken as a sign that something is rotting in a society,” Sarah Kendzior says. “Complaining is beautiful. Complaining should be encouraged. Complaining means you have a chance.” (225) Sometimes it takes a critic to get things to change, and Kendzior is such a critic. Her book, The View from…
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Small Towns as Moral Communities: A Review of The Left Behind
Here’s the plot: a ragtag group of survivors suddenly discovers that people who have been a significant part of their lives have moved on leaving them in a desperate moral quandary as they try to piece together what has happened and work for a better future. No, it’s not Tim LeHaye’s rapture series, Left Behind. …
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Your Civil War Is Too Easy: Looking for The Thin Light of Freedom with Ed Ayers
Who starts a story of the Civil War in the middle? By the time Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched up the Shenandoah Valley into Pennsylvania in July of 1863, the war had been going for more than two years. The twin Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on the 4th of July usually mark…
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Who’s Fighting For Democracy These Days?
Let’s talk politics. I don’t do this much on the blog, because it’s a toxic substance and has to be handled with care. But there’s no doubt that Heartlands had its origin in concerns about the political direction of the country. And there is no way to talk about these strange days of rural America…
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