Explore the lives of rural and Appalachian communities beyond stereotypes, including land, labor, industry, and local resilience.
Editorial illustration · not archival photographyLearn how company towns used housing, stores, scrip, isolation, and debt to control workers’ wages, mobility, and daily life, especially in coal and industrial
Read the story →Discover the stories and questions that connect this history to everyday life.
How industrialization, poverty, schooling, reform photography, court decisions, and federal law reshaped child labor and childhood in America.
Read the story
Explore how eminent domain displaced working-class and marginalized communities, reshaping neighborhoods, wealth, and trust in the name of development.
Read the story
Discover the history of African American farming, the struggle for land ownership, and how discrimination shaped opportunity in rural America.
Read the story
Explore how convict leasing emerged after slavery, how it blended punishment and profit, and how it shaped modern labor and incarceration through race, class, a
Read the story
Discover the history of redlining, how it shaped American neighborhoods, and why its effects still matter today — and how we can write a new future together.
Read the storyThese are stories from other collections that explore related themes, decisions, and lived experiences.
How the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border and reshaped Mexican American citizenship, land claims, and belonging in the Southwest.
Read the story
Urban renewal promised progress but often meant removal. Learn how redevelopment displaced communities — and how resilience kept their stories alive.
Read the story
Learn why certain industries actively resist unions, how employer opposition works, and what employees face when they try to organize in modern workplaces.
Read the story
Learn how AI’s data centers connect to the longer history of American infrastructure, electrification, land use, water, public subsidy, and environmental justic
Read the story