The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is--And Isn't

by Steven Conn

A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis.

It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we're missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs--fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don't exist and never did.

In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America--so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind--has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we've believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226826902
• ISBN13: 9780226826905
• Release Date: October 2023
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.4" x 9.2"