Major League Baseball’s plan to shrink its minor league system is upending a century of professional baseball in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia. The contraction plan, culling more than a quarter of its current teams, is forcing small towns to scramble for alternatives, including joining college or independent leagues. It’s […]
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Young leaders like Chris Dyson from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, are organizing an unprecedented number of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd. Historians say the range of localities participating is unprecedented. As one of the only Black kids growing up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (pop. 5,800), 21-year-old Chris Dyson […]
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In 2017, hours after an activist was killed at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new bluegrass band from Argentina called Che Apalache performed in a contest at the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, on the other side of the state. Joe Troop, the band’s founder and lead singer, […]
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When two Minnesota writers busted a star reporter for German magazine Der Spiegel for skewering their town with fabrications, it affirmed the worst stereotypes about condescending city journalists wading into the heartland. But you don’t have to make stuff up to worry about how your reporting on small-town America is […]
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The 1950s nirvana of unionized manufacturing jobs is gone forever, no matter how successful the Trump agenda may be. America’s geographic divides are becoming politically entrenched, as this election reminded us — and the economic forces driving the division aren’t going away. We’re not returning to a 1950s nirvana of […]
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