This Land Is Your Land
Country, folk, and bluegrass songs that capture the realities of rural labor.
20395 Article(s) by: Alex Press
Southern Strategy Soundtracks
Country music became the sound of Richard Nixon’s coalition in the early 1970s — but it has always been too unruly to be fully co-opted by a reactionary agenda.
The Redneck Menace
White Rural Rage is another attempt to blame the Democratic Party’s decline in rural counties on mean and bigoted white Americans.
Hayao Miyazaki’s Red Roots
Studio Ghibli is not the Japanese Disney but the anti-Disney. Dreamed up by animators with roots in the Japanese communist movement, its films celebrate creative labor and human solidarity against capitalism and war.
An Unusable Past
Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of collective farm buildings in Israel and the Baltic states reveal these communities’ utopian dreams — and their uncomfortable colonial underpinnings.
We Who Plowed the Prairies
Pastoral visions of farmwork don’t square with the reality of what it means to live in rural areas today.
Country Music Doesn’t Deserve Its Conservative Reputation
Musician Nick Shoulders talks to Jacobin about a genre that has long broadcast the struggles and aspirations of working people.
Talking Rural America With Thomas Frank
Urban elites’ contempt for rural America is centuries old — but so is rural populist resistance.
Peace to the Huts, War on the Palaces!
For thousands of years, organized peasants have challenged rural exploitation — and even toppled governments.
Communing With Nature
After stints in Haight-Ashbury, as many as one million hippies headed for the hills. Some of their communes have persisted into the present.
The UAW Heads South
The South has long remained a nearly impenetrable citadel for labor. Fresh off the success of its Big Three strike, the United Auto Workers wants to storm the castle.
Communist Cowboys
The Eastern Bloc’s “Ostern” filmmaking turned the mythology of the American Western on its head.
The People’s Propaganda
In the golden age of American political cartooning, Populist artists lampooned injustices that their contemporaries overlooked.
Issue 54: Dossier
The language of land management.
Issue 54: Letters
Send your crop report to [email protected].
The Black Belt Communists
During the Great Depression, black sharecroppers and the Communist Party waged war against tenant farming in the South.
When Bernie Went Back to the Land
While free love, weed, and tie-dye might not have been his bag, even the young Bernard Sanders of Brooklyn, NY, tried a life of living off the land. It didn’t work out.
Provincial Pretenders
The only thing more American than living and working on a farm is pretending you do.