Rural America, Lost and Found?

Perhaps I mean lost more than found, as it happens. I just finished reading the umpteenth millionth article purporting to offer explanation as to why rural Americans tended to vote enthusiastically for Trump, when I started following the livetweets from the AHA's opening plenary about presidents' first 100 days in office, past and future. After being promised by AHA promotweets that Trumpism would be a major topic, I tried a small experiment: I searched the massive conference program for panels (or papers) that dealt with rural America in the postwar period. I searched for words like "farm" and "rural" and I came up largely empty-handed.

There are certainly folks other than me who do this kind of thing. There are a few of the historians of capitalism, like Bethany Moreton and Shane Hamilton, who have taken their analysis of conservatism outside of the suburbs and Sunbelt - and there are the entire cohort of agricultural historians as well as the people who do farm labor and Appalachian Studies and the like. But in this most critical of years for explaining why rural America acts the ways it does, we're not offering up a strong, authoritative or really any voice at all. This would have been such a good place for historical context (and yes, I do understand that proposals were due before Trump locked in the nomination), but in a time of wild speculation, mea culpism (or sometimes they're culpism), and following one of the most epic failures of political punditry of the postwar period in predicting the election outcomes, this is exactly when historians' voices are most useful in the conversation. I take responsibility for my own failure to submit a paper that could have done a bit to push our analysis further. But really, I hope that one of the takeaways from the past year is that modern rural history must not be ignored, for fear of failing to understand the rural present.