Small Town America Research Articles

Viewpoint: Buildings Are the Stories of Our Lives: Historic Preservation and the Architectural Legacies of Chinese American Exclusion in Small-Town America

Viewpoint: Buildings Are the Stories of Our Lives: Historic Preservation and the Architectural Legacies of Chinese American Exclusion in Small-Town America

Rural Migrant Farmworker Demographics: Implications for Vocational Rehabilitation

Migrant populations have significant barriers for vocational rehabilitation (VR). Over one-quarter (26%) of farmworkers in the United States are migrant workers. Migrant farmwork often involves exposure to enhanced occupational hazards. Language barriers among farmworkers add additional challenges to vocational rehabilitation, as 77% of U.S. farmworkers identify Spanish as their primary language. Educational attainment is also a factor in vocational development for farmworkers, as the average level of education among farmworkers is eighth grade. Most migrant farmworkers are separated from all nuclear family members. A migratory lifestyle, isolated social conditions, lack of education, language differences, and fear of arrest or deportation establish barriers for VR service. In light of these unique barriers, the first step in improving VR outreach is to determine the geography of migrant work. This study utilizes data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America to identify states and counties with the highest rates of Mexican-born residents and highest rates of non-English speakers, discussing that data in the context of unemployment and poverty rates. A State Average Score was developed to arrange states by multiple factors that may indicate the presence of migrant communities. These multiple factors include counties with the highest non-English speaking rates, counties with the highest Mexican-born rates, counties with the highest poverty rates, and counties with the highest unemployment rates. The convergence of these data points within a single county may indicate the presence of migrant communities. Examples of outreach to migrant farmworkers are also presented.

Postcolonialism Goes Queer: Concealments and Disclosures in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names

Abstract: This article discusses All Our Names , the 2014 novel by Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-born, American immigrant writer. The narrative focuses on two figures: a young Ethiopian dreamer caught in the postcolonial military struggle in Uganda who later seeks safe haven in the US, and a single white American woman in her early thirties named Helen, a social worker at Lutheran Relief Services. Such a configuration certainly suggests the relevance of the postcolonial perspective, but in the novel, issues of race and postcolonialism are intertwined with the identity crisis aggravated by the ethnically polarized world of small-town America. Yet the identity that is destabilized is not merely racial but also sexual, through the convoluted and illicit erotic relationships in which the characters are enmeshed. This article analyzes the concealments of sexual identities and the struggles of the characters, who are reluctant to disclose their selves and the true nature of their relations with each other, first in the context of cultural dislocation engendered by involuntary migration to the United States, and then in the postcolonial setting of war-torn Uganda

Localized Syndemic Assemblages: COVID-19, Substance Use Disorder, and Overdose Risk in Small-Town America

Pandemics do not exist in isolation and COVID-19 is no exception. We argue that existing health crises, notably substance use disorder (SUD), developed syndemic relationships with COVID-19 that produced compounding deleterious effects. Combining Merrill Singer’s theory of syndemics and assemblage theory, we analyze the combinatory impact of overdose and COVID-19 within a localized context. We focus on Sandusky, Ohio, where we combine police reports, in-depth interviews with area residents, and ethnographic data to compare conditions before and after the emergence of COVID-19. We find dramatic shifts in relevant local contexts due to COVID-19, inhibiting existing systems of law and public policy aimed at overdose prevention and SUD treatment. Further, our findings provide evidence of complications in the COVID-19 response originating from the overdose epidemic.

Lee Shai Weissbach (1947–2022)

Lee Shai Weissbach (1947–2022) Janice W. Fernheimer (bio) Lee Shai Weissbach, professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisville, passed away on September 29, 2022. Born in Haifa to an Egyptian-born father and a Virginian-born mother, he moved to Cincinnati at the age of five. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati with high honors (1969), he went on to pursue a PhD in history at Harvard. His dissertation formed the basis for his first book, Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century France: Assuring the Future Harvest (Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Lee Shai joined the faculty of the University of Louisville in 1978 and spent his entire scholarly career there until his retirement in 2015. I had the honor and pleasure of meeting him in person when he agreed to be interviewed for the recently launched Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. I was a little nervous to meet the scholar whom I had informally referred as the "father" of Jewish Kentucky studies, but his warmth and kindness immediately put me at ease. What touched me most at the time (as a new and first-time mom) was learning how his scholarly trajectory had shifted to fit the needs of his growing family. With two young children at home, he was unable to continue his travels to France, so he shifted his studies to Jewish life in the United States, with particular interest in his local surroundings; the research that grew out of this shift transformed the way we think about and tell the story of American Jews and Judaism.1 Lee Shai had profound impact on the way American Jewish history is both told and analyzed. The Synagogues of Kentucky: History and Architecture (University Press of Kentucky, 1995) and the field-transforming Jewish Life in Small Town America (Yale University Press, 2005) have become foundational texts for thinking about American Jews and their institutions beyond the major industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. He authored more than a dozen scholarly articles that engaged Jewish life in both France and the United States, often focusing on Jews in southern and non-urban (and thus under-studied) settings. Before his retirement, he published A Jewish Life on Three Continents (Stanford [End Page 409] University Press, 2013). In this deeply personal scholarly work, Lee Shai introduced, translated, and annotated his own grandfather's memoir. A transnational story of migration, global politics, and the upheavals of change in Jewish life at the turn of the century, the project reflected both his familial roots and his historical interests. During his long career at the University of Louisville, Lee Shai was a productive scholar and an active university citizen. He served as department chair twice, spearheaded the creation of an endowed chair in Judaic studies, and was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2000–2003. Long-time friend and UofL colleague Tracy K'Meyer recalled Lee Shai to be "a warm, generous, and funny colleague, mentor, and friend. I will remember him most fondly for his pun-filled grammar tip sheet for students, which I still use in class; the truly bad jokes he shared at the department's annual winter potluck lunch; and his deep commitment to service to the profession, university, and community." Ranen Omer-Sherman, the scholar recruited to fill the endowed position in Judaic studies that Lee Shai created, recalls that his colleague enjoyed a "stellar reputation for his energy and enthusiasm for the historical profession, his eagerness to engage with colleagues no matter what their specialization, and his ability to make connections and forge intellectual ties across the boundaries of field and discipline. Indeed, for anyone active in the field of Jewish studies, he represents a truly exemplary model—even though that specialization is only a part of his accomplishments over a truly tireless and prolific career." Perhaps what most people will remember about Lee Shai is his mentschlichkeit. Long-time UofL colleague and professor of political science Jasmine Farrier praised Lee Shai for his willingness to mentor and collaborate across a wide variety of fields, as well as for his generosity with his time, advice, and good humor. Farrier also...

We Heard it When We Were Young by Chuy Renteria

Reviewed by: We Heard it When We Were Young by Chuy Renteria Jessica Tebo Chuy Renteria, We Heard it When We Were Young. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021. 218 pp. $16.00 (paper). In his debut memoir, We Heard it When We Were Young (2021), Chuy Renteria refers to his writing process as "like walking a tightrope" (202). This sense of balance, which is a skill that he physiologically employs as a bboy (or break dancer), permeates the entire memoir as he skillfully navigates the fraught responsibilities of representation. Renteria's recounting of his childhood growing up as a first-generation Mexican American in West Liberty, the first majority-Hispanic town in Iowa, is simultaneously a critical look at small-town America and a deeply personal self-examination of the effects of internalized racism in his life and in the lives of his friends and family. Renteria's account deliberately complicates the puff pieces that celebrate West Liberty as a model of diversity in the Midwest: "These puff pieces are hard to reconcile to the climate and animosity we felt as kids. It's tough. We want to celebrate and our town is more than willing to do so" (60). For Renteria, who is concurrently concerned with the inadequacy of language, "diversity" becomes problematic when it is leveraged as a feelgood buzzword to hide underlying problems. While Renteria does not shy away from revealing the problems of West Liberty and his complicated childhood there, he also exercises great compassion for the community. His friends and family, though far from perfect, are never beyond redemption, but Renteria does not rush readers towards resolution—he forces his audience to sit and wrestle with the complicated legacy of West Liberty. We Heard It departs from the linear narrative structure of a traditional Bildungsroman. The memoir is divided into five parts (including the epilogue) that feel more like long essays than chapters. The first, "Welcome to West Liberty," not only introduces readers to the town but also (and more importantly) to Renteria's relationship with his father, which was complicated by language barriers and how he internalized the way "people treated our parents like they were beneath them" (28). "Part Two: Fistfights and Quinceañeras" addresses another difficult familial relationship: the physically violent struggle between Renteria and his older sister, Nancy. In this section, Renteria acknowledges the gendered differences between his childhood and his sister's. In "Part Three: Lessons in B-Boying," Renteria's voice is confident and hopeful as he describes his entry into the world of break-dancing. [End Page 113] By the end of the section, however, Renteria reminds readers that "life doesn't always follow the narratives you see in the movies or read in the books. It can be senseless and brutal" (178). The following section, "Part Four: What Bonds Us Together," expounds upon this statement as things almost completely fall apart for Renteria as he struggles with an eating disorder while witnessing his parents' marital struggles. Renteria's boyhood friendships are important to all four of these sections and provide a common thread for readers to follow throughout the memoir. The West Liberty that emerges from these four sections is less of a solid place and more of a network of relationships that allow Renteria to freely explore its tangled intersectionalities of race, gender, and class. His mapping of West Liberty imitates the erratic and impulsive wanderings of a group of adolescent boys on bikes fighting off boredom. The memoir is difficult to track at times, but Renteria's thematic approach also lends itself to a sense of universality that might work well in an advanced high school class or even a college literature course for freshmen. While We Heard It is certainly place-based, Renteria also discusses bullying, eating disorders, teen pregnancy, familial conflict, and alcoholism—issues that can cross cultural boundaries and that all ultimately lead back to the two questions that Renteria poignantly asks himself: Did I have a good childhood and am I a good person? Renteria does not decisively answer either of these questions. Instead, he reflects: I want to convey what it was like to be a little kid...

Anger and Hope in Rural American Liturgy

Sociologists and political scientists have published a number of studies recently dealing with the tumultuous and often angry ethos of rural and small-town America. However, while a number of scholars have recognized that the anger and resentment present in much of the atmosphere of rural and small-town America is multifaceted and deeper than a simple desire for policy change, very little scholarly work has focused specifically on the role of ritual in exacerbating or alleviating social anger in these contexts. This article argues that the liturgical cultivation of hope is a powerful antidote to the vitriol of the political atmosphere in rural and small-town America (which can often be cultivated in its own right by rituals such as political rallies), and examines the ways in which such cultivation of hope takes place in rural Christian liturgy.

We're Here

We're Here

Sweet Greeks: First-Generation Immigrant Confectioners in the Heartland

Before reading this book, I mistakenly believed that the author was writing a family hagiography. A self-described “independent scholar,” I assumed that Ann Flesor Beck would not be up to the task of writing a well-documented, researched, and quality study of successful Greek immigrant confectioners to small-town central Illinois during the early twentieth century. I could not have been more wrong. Clearly, Beck has done her research, as evidenced by the fifty-six pages of notes and thirty-one-page bibliography, which includes many prominent immigration historians. She effectively uses a rarely explored rural niche to broadly discuss Greek immigration. As part of the Heartland Foodways series on “midwestern food traditions and practices” (p. ii), this book encourages the reader to investigate their other seven offerings.The first five chapters present an appropriate background for the following three that cover local Illinois history. Within those beginning chapters, Beck captures the essence of Greek immigration by discussing Greek history and geography, the reasons for leaving the homeland, the importance of the Greek Orthodox Church, the negative reception endured by southern Europeans in the United States, “Americanization,” and the initial immersion in an urban environment. By reviewing only arrival in Chicago and St. Louis, the way stations en route to central Illinois, Beck successfully traces the history of many Greek immigrants that acquired capital by laboring in those respective cities to eventually begin businesses in rural areas. This introductory portion also encompasses many well-known immigrant experiences including chain and circular migration, places such as Hull House in Chicago, and “padrones” like those included in Gunther Peck's Reinventing Free Labor.The fifth chapter, “Greeks vs. Goblins,” presents a comprehensive history of the Ku Klux Klan and particularly the organization's impact in central Illinois. Beck adeptly characterizes the Klan by emphasizing the “ordinariness” of members within small-town communities. Klan believers dominated many of these small towns throughout the Midwest by capitalizing on fraternal interest as well as the “100-percent Americanism” ideology that emanated during the post–World War I era in reaction to “foreign” peoples and ideas. Resultingly, many Greeks suffered discrimination, but others were able to withstand this offensive by becoming viable economic and social members of the community.The final three chapters provide detailed information about Beck's grandfather, the originator of the family confectionery in Tuscola, Illinois, in addition to a thorough review of both small cities and towns in the central portion of the state. Although the depth of reporting through the use of personal interviews, publications, census and draft records is impressive, it is also exhausting and confusing due to the overlapping of communities and families. Beck has compiled a wealth of information, but a more focused approach on a few personalities and less speculation may have made for a more readable book. Nonetheless, Greek migration to small-town America is the most original and important aspect of Beck's study.While Beck and her sister appear to have successfully rejuvenated the family business in Tuscola after a thirty-year absence, this is not the case in most small towns across the Midwest, if not the United States. Growing up in a northern Illinois small town and working in retail management from the 1970s to the early 2000s, I have personally witnessed this demise many times over. While opening stores and malls during the 1980s and 1990s, I observed downtown businesses similar to Beck's in Tuscola pay the price of “progress.” Moreover, just as Beck is encouraged that this dynamic may be changing with the advent of more emphasis on local economies during the last two decades, I concur based on movements generated by “farm-to-table” restaurants and other local initiatives. Beck mentioned that some of this localism resulted due to fears associated with 9/11; perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic and fears of urban unrest will add to this anxiety as people return to their hometowns in rural communities.

Working on the Farm: An Autoethnography Exploring Gender, Race, and Labor Divisions in Middle America

In this paper, the author reflects on her own work in the agritourism field as a Latina woman in the Midwest. Connecting place to lived experience, the author describes how her gender, ethnicity, language, and education are positioned within the food industry and within her career trajectory. By examining her individual journey, the author reveals systems of oppression that continue to maintain colonial divisions of labor in ways often overlooked or ignored in the everyday. Her story is an example of the struggle many women of color face as they navigate upward mobility within White and/or male-dominated arenas. Utilizing logics based in intersectionality, feminism, raciolinguistic, and racial capitalism, this story bears witness to the ways identities continue to be perceived, performed, accepted, and rejected against dominant narratives in small-town America.

One Child Town: The Health Care Exceptionalism Case Against Agglomeration Economies

This Article offers an extended rebuttal to the suggestion to move residents away from dying communities to places with greater economic promise. Rural America, arguably, is one of those dying places. A host of strategies aim to shore up those communities and make them more economically viable. But one might ask, “Why bother?” In a similar vein, David Schleicher’s provocative 2017 Yale Law Journal article, Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation, recommended dismantling a host of state and local government laws that operate as barriers to migration by Americans from failing economies to robust agglomeration economies. But Schleicher said little about the fate of the places left behind. Schleicher’s article drew a number of pointed responses, urging the value and preservation of Small Town America. But those arguments failed fully to meet the rational economic thesis, countering instead with more sentimental or humanitarian concerns. This Article offers a way to reconcile the two views, refracted through a health care lens. Health care is a particularly apt perspective for considering the question of whether America’s rural places are worth saving because it necessarily, under longstanding U.S. policy preferences, walks the line between economic principles and human rights; individual responsibility and communitarian values; the rational actor and the deserving recipient of aid. The health care exceptionalism case against agglomeration economies urges consideration of the real, quantifiable costs of migration and, correlatively, the value of home, as well as the market imperfections inherent in health care and, even more so, in rural health care.

"You're My First Jew:" University Student and Professor Experiences of Judaism in a Small Indiana City.

There has been a Jewish presence in Muncie, Indiana since before the city was incorporated in 1865. Most people, however, do not even know that the city has a synagogue or where it is located. This study contextualizes this small Jewish community within small-town America. For this study, we interviewed 12 Jewish individuals, including college students and faculty members at Ball State University, about their Jewish religion, identity, and experiences with antisemitism in this East-Central Indiana community. The interviews were transcribed and hand-coded for elements of Jewish life and identity, including the frequency of terms related to Jewish holidays, Christian dominance, and antisemitic interactions. These transcripts were also used to create a word corpus that was analyzed using a text analysis tool that calculates the frequency of dominant terms and their context. From this analysis, we determined that many Jewish college students and professors in Muncie experience Christian hegemony, not only because of public religious celebrations, feelings of difference, and Christian evangelization on campus and in public spaces, but also because many of the people interviewed revealed experiences of being someone’s “first Jew,” or the first Jewish person they have met.

Small-town Styx: Edgar Lee Masters, Rural Confinement and Pastoral Subversion

ABSTRACT When Edgar Lee Masters wrote his obituary of small-town provincialism, Spoon River Anthology (1916), the literary movement known as the ‘revolt from the village’ was becoming increasingly defined. Writers like Mary Austin, Willa Cather and, later, Sherwood Anderson penned desolate portraits of rural America, disturbing the nineteenth century idyll of small-town America in favour of a community space ‘caught between industrial progress and gradual oblivion’ (Honaker Herron, 1971). This article explores rural confinement, spatial determinism, and psychological unfulfillment in Masters’ text, all of which are borne directly of Spoon River’s physical and metaphorical isolation. The spatial construction of Masters’ community will be scrutinised, tracing in its pastoral subversion and funereal conceit of the cemetery a melancholy commentary on small-town provincialism. Through consideration of the river as a physical and spiritual barrier, I will conclude that Masters’ text provides a rural portrait in which the small town is entirely beholden to this naturalistic symbol. By considering the various writers and ideologies that run concurrently with Masters, it will be contended that in this particular meeting of waters rural America becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate. Its inhabitants instead grow stagnant, the people embittered, and, in their narratives, a ‘buried life’ (Channell Hilfer, 1969) is dredged up from the silt.

The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism by Adam R. Ochonicky

Reviewed by: The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism by Adam R. Ochonicky Christopher D. Stone Adam R. Ochonicky , The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $32.00 (paper). Released the same year that five Best Picture nominees, including the winner, took place in the cinematic Midwest, Adam R. Ochonicky’s The American Midwest in Film and Literature examines popular representations of America’s heartland via a carefully curated array of cultural texts. His collection hinges mostly on film and skews heavily to the last three decades. Ochonicky divides his study into nine chapters, each one focusing typically on three text or film examples. Although the book’s subtitle bestows equal weight to “violence” and “nostalgia,” the latter earns top billing in practice. Indeed, if violence stalks half the study, nostalgia pervades all but one chapter. Ochonicky defines nostalgia as “a general preoccupation with idealized imagery of the past and a related desire to reenact or somehow to relive that past which has been lost or potentially is entirely fabricated” (9). He augments this definition by identifying three modes of nostalgia. Nostalgic spatiality is connected to a physical space; nostalgic violence stems from the desire to manage the behavior or appearance of others; and nostalgic atonement tries to redress the present’s debt to the past. Of the three, nostalgic spatiality looms the largest. It certainly infuses the first chapter, which tackles the writings of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900), and Vincente Minnelli’s film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). While lining up the Technicolor Judy Garland musical alongside turn-of-the-century texts is a bit awkward, especially since Ochonicky slots all other period pieces by release date, his discussion of Turner’s idealized nostalgia establishes a series of ideas that he profitably revisits throughout the book. The second chapter jumps ahead to the Great Depression and World War II, engaging Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s sociological study Middletown (1929), Preston Sturges’s movie The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek [End Page 189] (1944), and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940). Drawing on James R. Shortridge—one of the book’s major influences, along with Victoria E. Johnson—Ochonicky casts the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as an era in which the Midwest’s popular stock fell. This occurred due partly to the influence of “revolt from the village” writers. Enjoining and advancing that trend, the latter two titles assail their respective midwestern settings by satirizing the pious pretentions of small-town America and castigating the cramped, infuriating, racist conditions of Chicago. According to chapter 3, the region’s image did not improve in the 1970s. Here Ochonicky employs three films—Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) to reflect on nostalgic violence. Whether via an obsessively memorializing, James Dean-channeling killer who longs to conform (Badlands), or expatriate Germans failing to restart their lives in Wisconsin (Stroszek), or a killing machine who ritualistically reenacts the slaying of his sister in a bid to recreate the Long Fifties ( Halloween), these films feature vacuous White males whose violence obscures their vacancy. Whereas the first half of Ochonicky’s book races through eight decades of cultural representations, the final three chapters linger on twelve years. The first of these chapters uses three films—Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) to analyze masculine violence. While Boys Don’t Cry fits snugly within the rubric of nostalgic violence, Ochonicky advances different themes with the other two movies. For example, he posits Gran Torino as a throwback to Frederick Jackson Turner. Here the protagonist is a rugged individualist operating within a new borderland betwixt “civilization” and “savagery” who saves a Hmong family by instructing them on how to be White and masculine. The film equates Whiteness and masculinity with assertiveness, productiveness, and being comfortable with racial slurs. If Gran Torino exhibits apprehension about changing demographics, the films of chapter five, Alexander Payne’s About...

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Change in U.S. Small Town Community Capitals, 1980-2010.

The county scale has thus far dominated rural demographic research—this descriptive profile of small town America is unique with its place-based lens. Another important extension is the nationwide application of the Community Capitals Framework which builds on the body of research examining capitals within case studies focused on one or more communities. Here, we examine place-based “community capitals” at the national scale through novel integration of data from a wide variety of sources. The goal is to identify tiny town socioeconomic and demographic patterns of change—or trajectories—over the past several decades—and contrast remote small towns with those proximate to metropolitan areas. Results reveal both commonalities and distinctions. Instead of differences in trends across time, the analyses suggest that what differs are the more general profiles of small places as contrasted with national data. For example, regardless of metro proximity, small town America has lower levels of human and financial capital. Still, distinction also appears in that rural population growth has focused on high-amenity regions, bringing some increases in community capitals but potentially also exacerbating inequalities. In all, the analyses presented here offer an important foundation for necessary work at the place scale to improve understanding of the nuances inherent in population shifts, and their implications, within rural communities.

The Changing Demography of Rural and Small-Town America

The rural United States is sometimes viewed as a paragon of stability, but demographic change has been a constant. Rural and small-town America is diverse, dynamic, and relational to (rather than separate from) urban places. Dominant demographic trends in the rural U.S. over recent decades include depopulation (driven by population aging and youth out-migration), increasing ethnoracial diversity (especially as linked to Hispanic population growth), and in-migration to select areas associated with metropolitan adjacency (i.e., exurban growth), retirement destinations, and natural amenities. This special issue of Population Research and Policy Review assembled a group of papers focused squarely on the changing demography of rural and small-town America in the early twenty-first century that address issues of broad interest to demographers: population growth and decline, fertility, mortality, migration, ethnoracial composition, and economic inequality. The prospect is for a rural America marked by ever more diversity and inequality within and between places. Our hope is that these articles, and the broader spectrum of scholarship on rural demography they represent, will inspire the next generation of research in this area.

A Demographic Lifeline? Immigration and Hispanic Population Growth in Rural America

Can immigration save rural and small town America? Our goal is to highlight the new racial dynamics of population change in nonmetropolitan areas, where slowing population growth rates since 1990 eventuated in widespread depopulation during the post-2010 period. We use 3141 counties as the unit of analysis, tracking population change data over the 1990 to 2017 period. Our results, based on decennial census counts and population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, show that Hispanic population growth has been spatially ubiquitous, occurring in both declining and growing nonmetropolitan counties. Hispanic growth has slowed but not reversed chronic declines in rural population. Significantly, the growth of Latinos benefited a majority of historically depopulating or declining nonmetropolitan counties as well as nonmetropolitan counties that have continued to grow. Our analyses also reveal substantial heterogeneity in patterns of population change in nonmetropolitan America. Latino population growth often makes the difference between overall county population growth and decline. Nearly 200 nonmetropolitan counties grew during the 2010–2017 period, but only because Hispanic population increases offset non-Hispanic population declines. For these counties, which account for about 10 percent of all nonmetropolitan counties, Latinos clearly provided a demographic lifeline. Hispanics population gains were usually insufficient to reverse population declines in historically depopulating counties but nevertheless slowed the pace of decline. Hispanic growth was greatest in counties where the population was growing, resulting in a demographic multiplier effect.

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America ed. by Nora Shalaway Carpenter

Reviewed by: Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America ed. by Nora Shalaway Carpenter Elizabeth Bush Carpenter, Nora Shalaway, ed. Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America. Candlewick, 2020 [336p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781536212105 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781536216110 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-12 If you live in a burg with fewer than ten thousand residents that is “significant driving distance” from an urban center, you’re small-town—at least within the scope of this collection of short stories, poems, memoirs, and graphic works by authors who’ve lived the life. That covers a lot of ground in America, as the collection spans the continent from Alaska to Georgia, with plenty of stops across the heartland. A generous handful of the tales offer particularly rich storytelling—S. A. Cosby’s story of a fraught encounter between a wealthy Black entrepreneur and his blue collar Black employee over a missing watch; Ashley Hope Pérez’s poem in which stealthy references to sexual abuse are tucked among verses extolling the beauty and camaraderie of rural life; and stories by Rob Costello and Nasugraq Rainey Hopson in which teens in the Catskills and in Alaska confront specters from respective local lore. While stories rife with details about overheated engines and weak broadband internet service, of segregation and wringer washers and outhouses, and of marginalized groups facing bigotry may suggest a monolithic reality that the editor is explicitly hoping to dispel, readers who are honest enough to recognize that these themes are not confined to rural areas may realize from these stories that the line between urban and rural living is not sharply defined. Bios and comments by contributors are appended. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois