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

Conn, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226845400 ISBN 13: 9780226845401

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of many books, most recently Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226845400
• ISBN 13: 9780226845401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320