Beyond the Myth of Rural America

The category “rural” spans a vast range, including small towns, reservations, timberlands, and ranches. One thing that unites such places, however, is that they’re rarely thought of as particularly modern. In the “natural order of things,” Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” agrarian life precedes urbanization: history starts with people working the land, and only after they succeed are cities possible. In this account, rural people are, like horseshoe crabs, holdovers—living representatives of a distant past. Hence, the frequent judgment that life beyond cities is more “rooted” or, less sympathetically, “backward.” Read more >