Sarah Vogel’s The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm covers litigation from the farm crisis of the 1980s. Vogel begins by declaring the book to be “a memoir of a lawsuit I brought against the federal government.” In this book review, Professor Hannah Haksgaard explores how The Farmer’s Lawyer is indeed a memoir, but it is also so much more.

A reading list of rural-related literature curated by the Rural Reconciliation Project. This collection explores how national mythmaking extracts and appropriates rural narratives for its own purposes.

For too long, the story of rural America has seemed inevitable: mines closed; farming became unprofitable; rural post offices and train stations shuttered. When read in the passive voice, the declines of rural places and their people just…happened. But considering that the overwhelming majority of the American landscape is rural, how has so much of the country come to be thus marginalized? And if we care about rural communities—and about the cities and suburbs that ostensibly rely on their resources, no matter how invisible that relationship may be today—how can we work towards revitalization?

Over eight chapters, legal scholar and practitioner Ann M. Eisenberg summarizes and systematically dismantles the passive voice at the core of myths about rural decline, dependency, and potential renewal.

Macro-level structural forces, local institutions, race, class, livelihoods, culture, landscapes, and neighborhood dynamics all come together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. It is at this essential intersectional nexus that Amanda McMillan Lequieu’s 2024 book, Who We Are is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt, so adeptly advances the conversation on place-based marginalization and struggle. Who We Are identifies this holistic, multi-factor intersection of place, culture, and economic survival as something we all instinctively know, but may still struggle to define: “home.”

A reading list of rural-related literature curated by the Rural Reconciliation Project. This collection focuses on rural violence and notions of justice in rural communities.

A reading list of rural-related literature curated by the Rural Reconciliation Project. This collection focuses on rural violence and notions of justice in rural communities.

A reading list of rural-related creative nonfiction curated by the Rural Reconciliation Project. This collection focuses on rural homecomings and the revisiting of rural homeplaces.