The multifaceted divide which separates many people in the United States living in rural versus urban areas is dramatic and influential. Better understanding this divide and its historic roots is critical if we want to truly “heal our culture.”
There have been a lot of speeches televised from Wisconsin this week, and a number of promises have been made some of which are nostalgic and arguably unrealistic, when it comes to jobs and manufacturing. However, the role of government in influencing the economy and economic changes within our society can be enormous, and all of these dynamics need to be more carefully studied and better understood.
With these thoughts in mind, the following podcast conversation is excellent and illuminating.
Full description:
“Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux?
Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community’s founding industry.
In Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt (Columbia UP, 2024), Amanda McMillan Lequieu links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home—how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change.”
These stories remind me of the wonderful Ken Burns documentary series, “The Dust Bowl,” based on the excellent book by Timothy Egan, “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.” Both share the stories of individuals and families who stayed in the Oklahoma panhandle during the years of the dust bowl. When we lived in Oklahoma and I helped teachers create digital stories about family history, there were some powerful stories around these themes created. This is one of them, “The Dirty Thirties.” I have use this as an example in many digital storytelling workshops in the past for Storychasers.
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