Join me in this live 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about how Americans value and appreciate the places we inhabit and the futures we can imagine for them.

My name is Steven Conn and I am the W. E. Smith Professor of American History at Miami University. The one in Ohio. Think cornfields, not Cuban food. For the last decade or so I’ve been thinking a lot about the geography of our politics. About the hostility between “urban” and “rural” that shapes a great deal or our political discourse, our policy choices, and our fights over what it means to be American.

In some ways, the work I’ve been doing has been an attempt to make sense of my own experiences. I’m a city kid by upbringing and inclination – raised in Philadelphia in fact – but I now live in a tiny town in rural Southwest Ohio. I’ve been trying to make sense of all the contradictions I have seen and experienced moving back and forth between urban and rural worlds.

All I’ve discovered is what I hope to share with you in my upcoming class, Five Things I’ve Learned about America’s Urban-Rural Divide – It’s the Geography Stupid. The urban-rural divided has been coded into our political understanding. We all know the blue-red maps of our national elections that tell the story of this divide. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won a scant 15% of the counties in the country – all of them urban – and yet garnered three million more votes that Donald Trump. And yet because rural votes constitutionally have more weight the loser won. All of which is to say: we need to understand the dynamics between urban and rural.

But I’m an historian so the way I understand the world is to dig into just how the present got to be the way it is and to think about how the past contours the present. And the result of all that digging – in archives and local libraries, old newspapers and government reports – has been two books that explore the nature of the urban-rural divide. The first, Americans Against the City was published in 2014 and the second, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is – and Isn’t came out late in 2023.

I hope you will join me for this 90-minute class. I want to share my findings about urban and rural. I want to raise some questions I hope will provoke. Like: why, when 80% of us now live in large metro areas, do so many Americans dislike their cities? Has rural America really been “left behind”? Is it even a thing at all? My goal is to introduce you to some things you may not have thought about before, and to put some of things you know in a new context. And I want to talk about it all with you.

And the stakes here aren’t only political. How we understand urban and rural speaks to how we value and appreciate the places we inhabit and the futures we can imagine for them.

So please join me for what I promise will be a lively and interesting conversation.

– Steven Conn