87. A Conversation with Steven Conn, Lies of The Land
Hello, one and all, and welcome back to a brand-new episode of "The Rural Impact," another conversation that works hard to connect those dots between policy and rural everything, or as you hear me say so often, rural quality of life. I'm Michelle Rathman, and I really mean it when I say thank you to all of our return listeners, and if you're new to the podcast, welcome.
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This is a conversation that I've been wanting to have for quite some time, but I believe it will-- I will just say this, I believe it's gonna inspire you to go out and buy this book, "The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is and What It Isn't," and that is historian Steven Conn. So, my conversation with Steven was recorded on July 1st, just before the July 4th holiday and America's 250th.
As I said, I've been waiting to have this conversation for some time, but I thought it would be super important and appropriate, and really timely to have it right now because it is that time when Americans are reflecting, even though we've just passed that date, as of course that you're hearing this on the 16th of July, the first time you hear it.
And I saw flags flying. I'm sure you did too. Maybe you purchased one as well, those 250-year flags flying high, in tribute to this momentous occasion, in celebration of our country, while at the same time, unfortunately, there are some efforts underway to also erase some of our history from conversations and classrooms.
So, what I've just shared with you might sound a little bit controversial. We really intend to present you with the facts as we read them, talk to folks, and really rely on those who are in the know. A few examples of this, and again, I'm gonna make sure that I put these links on our website in our resource page.
But for this episode, I’ll just share with you something I read on June 30th, 2026, not too long ago, an analysis by the Center for American Progress titled "Censored: Erasing 250 Years of American History on Public Lands." And this piece discusses a leaked Department of the Interior database that reveals really the scope and scale of the administration's efforts to erase Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized histories, along with science-related content from public lands nationwide.
And this includes things like the pamphlets that are handed out for people when they're going to a national park or a museum. So, I found that interesting. And then also on July 1st, one year ago, just a few days after one year ago, a report on PBS News that looks at what's behind the efforts to reshape how American history is taught in schools.
And if you go back, and again, we'll put the link on our website, and look at this reporting and listen and read the transcript, you're going to hear from someone named Cathy Gorn. And Cathy is discussing National History Day, and she talks about how teachers in some areas are being told what they can't teach in certain subject areas when it comes to America's history, a trend now expanding to over 20 states.
So, we are watching this space. Maybe you are as well. I share these examples with you because on today's show, we are going to be talking about history. Specifically, as you would imagine, we are talking about rural history, the parts of America's rural history that have paved the way for our rural present, including the roads that have lifted parts of what we define as rural America up, and equally important, parts that have left significant parts of our 50 contiguous states, well, let them down.
So, I really appreciated reading "Lies of the Land" and talking with Steve. And the reason, one of the many reasons, is that while policy is really an inescapable thread running through this remarkable accounting in his book and our conversation, it need not be debated in terms of left, right, red, and blue.
It is just because, as we know, all roads to quality of life are paved by policy. And whether it was the periods of transforming rural lands with militarization, factories in place of farms, big chains that have really hamstrung rural economies, suburbanization, or, of course, the polarizing and divisive us versus them that should not, however, continues to define rural narratives in our public discourse.
I say this because you will find it all rooted some way, shape, or form in policy. So with that said, it is that time that I invite you to put yourself in that podcast frame listening of mind and take in my conversation with Steven Conn. But first, I want you to hear from our partners at the National Association of Rural Health Clinics because they have an invitation for you as well.
Are you ready? You know I always am, so let's go.
Michelle Rathman: Hey, Steven Conn, historian and author of many books, including the one we're gonna focus on today, Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is and Isn't. Welcome to The Rural Impact. We, I mean it when I say we are so grateful to have you join us.
Steven Conn: Michelle, thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this.
Michelle Rathman: Well, thank you so much. You know, Steve, I first learned about your work when you joined Tony Pipa at Brookings for one of their fantastic 'On the Front Porch' conversations to talk about Lies of the Land. And of course, while that was in May of 2024, which seems like a million years ago to me, I really I believe the content is, is worthy of discussion today and likely for a long time to come, so let's get right into it.
Steven Conn: Good
Michelle Rathman: All right, so before we do that, I want you to share with our listeners, if they're not familiar with your work, and we're gonna make sure we put links to your, all of the great stuff that you've written on our website, theruralimpact.com.
But talk to us about how you came to research rural and write about rural in particular, 'cause it really is a fascinating read.
Steven Conn: Oh, thank you so much for saying that. There are two answers to that question. one is, one is the kind of academic answer, and the other is the more personal answer. The academic answer is that back in 2014, I published a book which examined the attitudes Americans have about their cities. And, you know, it's not a bad little book, if I do say so myself, but that was 2014.
In 2016, this book got, I'll put it in quotes, "discovered," by a lot of people in the media as somehow a key to understanding the urban-rural divide, which was the issue of the moment during that campaign. So, I wound up taking all these interviews, phone calls, and press inquiries about the urban-rural divide.
And, you know, to be perfectly frank, I felt a little bit like a fraud because I didn't actually know anything about rural America. I'm an urban historian by training. So I, you know, so I did the best I could. I did these interviews, and I promised myself that at some point I would actually turn my attention and do a book on rural America. So that's the, the academic answer to where this book comes from.
The personal answer is that for the last 20 years, I've lived in a very small town in the middle of farm country in southwest Ohio. And about 10 years ago, I moved from Ohio State University, where I had been teaching, to Miami University, which is also in a very small town surrounded by corn and soybean fields.
And so, as I go back and forth between these two places, I kept thinking to myself, "You know, I ought to know, about these places and spaces, in a way that I just didn't." And, so that was the other promise I made to myself, that I would, I would get to know the environment that I am a part of on a regular weekly basis.
So that's where this book comes from.
Michelle Rathman: You know, you, the book opens up by saying very simply, which w- is really an eye-catcher, "A book about rural America is preposterous on its face." And so, and there have been so many, and we've had many authors on this, on this podcast, and so many folks who are just focused on rural. Of course, we are all about making the connection between policy and rural quality of life.
So, explain what you mean by that, why it is preposterous on its face. I think it's just really a great jumping point.
Steven Conn: Well, thanks. The, what I really mean by that is that we, in our discourse, and I mean that, whether it's politics or policy, whether it's just sitting around talking with friends, we use the singular rural, when in fact there are lots and lots of different kinds of rural in this country, each of which with its own history, its own economic dynamics, its own social dynamics, its cultural, flavors.
And so, you know, to somehow capture that in a single book, all of that diversity and variety, as I said in that sentence, is preposterous. So, I wanted to be upfront with my readers that I can't do all of that justice.
Michelle Rathman: You know, one of the reasons I wanted to make sure that we had this conversation today in particular, as I teed up before you joined us, that we are recording this on July 1st, just before the July 4th 250th anniversary. And one of the things that I, many things in the book that I find fascinating, but you do talk a lot about the crisis and myth, and I would like to explore that with you because one of the things that you said in that introduction was, "No word has been used more consistently to describe rural America than crisis, and a perpetual sense of crisis has driven our attempts to understand and address what is going on in rural places.
In study after study, report after report, and policy prescription after policy prescription for at least a century, the DNA of that crisis has also been remarkably unchanging."
So I think that right there, you talk about what has gone wrong, whether it's the 1880s, 1930s, 1980s, and today. Unfortunately, I am a part of that conversation, and I wish I didn't have to have conversations about the, in quote, "rural crisis" because healthcare is one of them, and I know that's something that you've discussed as well.
So let's...I just want our listeners to really understand where you're coming from, where you talk about, you know, the myth and the, the crisis and the myth and the influences of how America perceives rural, and the notion that it's always in crisis. Like, we can't escape it, you know?
Steven Conn: Yeah. I, so I think what I began... So, let me take two steps back and say when I sat down to do this book, I thought what I was gonna do was provide the historical understanding for the rural crisis, because that was the language everybody was using when I was doing the book. We're still using that language.
But what I discovered going through all the sources is that language of crisis and all of its variations has been the way we've always talked about rural America. So it sort of begs the question, when was rural America not in a crisis? And it turns out, well, never.
Therefore, at least again, you go through these historical sources, and whether you're reading in the 1880s or theas you said, 1930s, 1850s, if we wanna go back that far.
So, it seemed to me, therefore, that what we're talking about is, is a perception of a reality which differs from some imagined condition that, as it turned out, never really existed. And so that's what I began to, to unpack a little bit. What is this rural mythology? Why do we think we have declined from that, right?
Because that's what we're talking about. It used to be great, and now it's not so good. And I think that really has hindered our, not only our understanding of rural places, but the way we design policies for them, because there is this perception that we, we wanna go back to the way things were. Well, the way things were exactly when?
And, right, we don't wanna go back to the 1930s. We don't wanna go back to the 1880s. So, I think it gets in the way of thinking more realistically, and maybe with clearer eyes about policy alternatives.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah, 'cause you say, you know, the people, this, the phrase, "the people left behind" is a phrase and a phenomenon that has echoed over decades and decades, and I've been working in rural spaces for over 30 years, so I just, my head is just nodding at almost every phrase that I read in the book because you're, it's so true.
So, let's talk about some of that. Let's talk about some of the historical events that have both shaped the crisis and the myth, if you don't mind.
Steven Conn: Sure. So, I think you know, I blame it on Thomas Jefferson, but, maybe that's, you know, too easy or cheap. But I think there was, in the late 18th century, a perception that what we were gonna start here at 250 years ago, was a farm-based republic, where the norm would be a private farm ownership, small-scale production, yeoman farmers, whatever you wanna call it.
That was going to be the American ideal, and any deviation from that across the decades has been seen somehow as, as a failure or a failing. That mythology, I don't think, has ever really been true. And okay, I'm gonna stop here and insert the obvious joke. Thomas Jefferson telling us about yeoman farmers, that's pretty funny if you think about it, 'cause he never picked up a plow in his life.
But somehow, he venerated these sorts of people. He's not alone in the late 18th century. The problem, of course, right, is that if you look at the trend lines, in terms of American population, we may believe ourselves to be a nation of yeoman farmers, but everybody is moving to the cities.
The decade with the fastest rate of urban growth in the nation's history is the 1830s. So, Jefferson wants us all to be independent farmers, but in fact, Americans are running off the farm and to the cities. And so, that creates a kind of, I think, kind of crisis of American identity or a cognitive dissonance about what it really means to be an American.
That I think is at the center of what I was trying to explore.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah. You know, in the next section that you talk about, and I'm gonna kind of put them together, but I know they are completely separate subjects on their own, but they do have that at the end, the same implications, and that's exploring and comparing the impacts of both, you talk about the militarization and manufacturing, you know, in part one of the book, the militarized space.
And, you know, Steve, this really hit home for me. I'm trying to remember how many years ago it was, you know, BC, so before COVID. I worked with a number of critical access hospitals in the state of Idaho, and their mothership was a larger system. They were acquired, you know, and so forth.
And so, I went to four critical access hospital communities, each of them completely different. Some of them, you know, rural but luxury, and then some are really rural and impoverished. And the one I went to that was in that more deteriorated condition, just, driving into the community, was where there was a former military base.
And so, this section of the book really pulled at my heartstrings, 'cause I'm thinking, "Yeah. Oh my gosh." So, talk about that. Talk about the militarized space and the influence of that, you know, kind of that crisis manufacturing, if you will.
Steven Conn: Yeah, so, you know, at some level, once, once you sort of look at the rural areas in this way, it's obvious. That is to say that the way we got a rural in the first place, as opposed to a wilderness, was a military operation. That starts in the end of the 18th century. It's one of the reasons we declare independence from Great Britain.
The British didn't want us to expand westward. We did, and it's right there in the Declaration. So the job of even creating the space which we now call rural was at its root military. That's through the 19th century, the end of the Indian Wars, let's call it 1890. At which point the nation's military modernizes, and it, becomes a, a global force, right?
World War I, and then World War II for sure, and then the Cold War. And in the expansion of the military footprint of this country, that takes place mostly on rural ground. With the exception, maybe, of the Navy yards that are located, have been located in coastal cities. Army bases, Air Force bases, testing ranges, all that sort of stuff, those are all rural environments.
And what it creates is this economic dependency, so that as you discuss, when a military base disappears from a rural area, when it gets closed down, or it’s, you know, it's shifted or consolidated, those communities which have become so dependent on all of that government spending find themselves in really deep economic trouble.
The case study I looked at in this was an Air Force base on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but the story could be told of a lot of these places where we once had a big base, and now we don't
Michelle Rathman: And the same is true for manufacturing, right?
Steven Conn: Yep. Yeah. Really starting in the 1930s, World War II, but I think it accelerated after the, after the war was over, the idea of moving manufacturing operations out into rural areas became really popular. And it was a kind of confluence of circumstances. These manufacturers are looking for cheaper land, they're looking for cheaper labor, so they move out of Cleveland or Detroit or Philadelphia.
Rural places are looking for some kind of economic stimulus, because farming, is not-- doesn't employ people in the way that it used to. and so you have a surplus labor pool, and they're--, and people are trying to figure out what to do about that. The problem is that, for a lot of rural communities, is that it becomes a race to the bottom.
These rural communities lobby with these corporations. They fight with each other over tax breaks and other kinds of goodies. And sometimes this works, but more often than not, the plant will be there for, I'll call it 10 years, maybe 15 years, then it too will close, and it will move someplace else where it got a bigger bag of tax breaks and goodies from that particular county.
So, some people have called this smokestack chasing a rural development strategy, and I'm skeptical of it. I don't think that the track record is particularly good in a sustainable way.
Michelle Rathman: Well, that is such an amazing point right there because in the episode that just dropped before this one, we had a conversation about, I hate to say it, data centers
Steven Conn: Oh yeah, there you go
Michelle Rathman: All right? And so, it makes me really understand- I look at it like, man, have we not learned?
Steven Conn: Yeah, yeah, exactly
Michelle Rathman: Because what you just said, I mean, we take a look at what happened in Lexington, Nebraska, and they had a big, you know, Tyson food processing plant employed all these, and now nothing, it's gone.
It's an empty footprint, and people are without jobs and so forth, and I'm thinking the same. We're gonna repeat the same cycle. It feels that way.
Steven Conn: Yeah, I think that, rural America, like if you-- I'm trying to come up with a quick metaphor here. If you think of the-- of American capitalism as a kind of whipsaw, it goes through these cycles of up and down and back and forth. Rural America more often than not is on the far end of that. It feels those effects more dramatically and more painfully than metropolitan America does.
So, the question is this really-- can we think about a different way of doing economic development so that these rural places don't wind up, on the receiving end of that whipsaw process? data centers and, and you know, just before they came along, big warehouse operations, Amazonand whatnot.
I think lots-- the way people have looked at rural America, if you're sitting in a boardroom someplace, is that rural America is and always has been a place of resource exploitation. And maybe that meant mining in certain parts of the country. Maybe that meant timber in the other parts of the country.
Mostly it means land, now, and labor. But now, why are these data centers moving out there? Well, because of cheap electricity and cheap water. And I was in a county in Georgia, oh, three or four months ago, where a data center had opened up maybe two years ago, and literally the wells had been sucked dry.
People woke up in the morning, turned on the tap, and there was no water. And that's because people in rural America are so reluctant, so desperate in some sense, for any kind of economic development that they give it all away for free. There's no reason that the data center should have sucked up all of that water, except that they, you know, were permitted to come in carte blanche and do that to these people.
And so, I think we really have to rethink the kinds of-- if we wanna think about economic development, we have to think of some new models. That would be my, my mantra.
Michelle Rathman: You know, I'm gonna...Well, my gosh, there are so many things I wanna ask you, and I think this is a good point to just talk about the fact that there is a consensus among many in the policy space that federal policy has become local policy. And you've suggested that structures of government and rural places are inadequate.
And you're not talking about the people, but these data projects like these data centers, because we're on that subject, or whether it's a warehouse or a cross-docking station or whatever. I mean, where are we missing the point where the policy is concerned that says, "Wait a minute, this is, you know, it's not all as it seems.
There, there's gotta be some negative aspects of these developments." W- Where do we see local policy not picking up the ball where it needs to be? Because that's where those decisions have to be made
Steven Conn: Yeah. So, I'm gonna say two things, which I know would get me banned in about six different states. We need more regulation, and we need more government, and those things go hand in hand. And let me explain what I mean. At the local level, I think, and I've-- I have been involved in local level government, in the little town, the county that I'm in.
It just doesn't have the capacity, and that's not a slight on anybody involved. I know people, I have been among those people who work their tails off, but there simply isn't the capacity to deal with the kinds of issues that are coming down the pipe, whether it's, how you deal with, right, the arrival of a big data center, how you manage your water, how you manage your energy, especially your electricity, what to do about climate, which of course, right, I'm-- you're sweltering, I'm sweltering here in another, epic heat wave.
So, in some sense, what one, one answer to this question is that there need to be more people involved in those processes. Government mechanisms need to be increased. I just think there's no way around that. I would argue that that's true at the state and federal level as well, and I'm happy to have that fight with others, you know, with people if, if we wanna get into it, because of course the mantra in this country has always been less government, government is bad, government is the problem.
And I think when you turn on the tap and the water doesn't come out; you realize that maybe government is the solution. Along with that, we need to regulate more, and that's again, something that has been verboten since the 1980s. But especially around environmental questions, right? We…
Go back to you, you talked about the Tyson plant in Nebraska. I have a friend who's worked a lot in meat processing plants in Iowa, where there are also a bunch of big operations. The regulations on the waste coming out of these factory-scale farms are so poor that all of that, forgive me, manure, is flowing into the Mississippi River ultimately, and the shrimp industry in Louisiana is dying off because of pig manure from Iowa.
That's a regulatory problem, and it cannot be handled at a local level. It has to be handled at a higher level. I'll get off my soapbox.
Michelle Rathman: Well, timestamp it where we are. T- 2026 and the regulatory policies have gone, have taken, in my view, a backslide, and we, we weren't, we weren't ahead in any way, shape, or form. I wanna talk a little bit about, I'm so glad that you wrote about this as well, kind of the corporatization impact.
And I say from the Five and Dime, my family, my father was from rural Minnesota, you know, a family farm. They were a farm family from Five and Dime, Woolworth, to Dollar General. And I'm so glad that your wife, you mentioned this in an interview, said, "Talk about Dollar General," because I'll tell you what, they are on my... I, they'll never become partners of this show, so it doesn't matter. They are on my public enemy, enemy number one list. You, you know, they've made it so that people are completely dependent. They are the only game in town. Could you, town, could you talk about from Five and Dime to Dollar General
Steven Conn: Sure. Yeah.
Michelle Rathman: Impact there?
Steven Conn: So, I found this a really interesting story, which I didn't know anything about when I sat down to write about it. But once upon a time, especially in communities like your-- you grew up in, and your family grew up in. Small towns which served as hubs of agricultural regions across the Midwest, across parts of the South as well, these Woolworths or J.C. Penney's became members of the community, right?
They sponsored the Little League team. It's where people met, on Saturday to have lunch or go to the ice cream fountain, all of that sort of stuff. When Woolworths and J.C. Penney, and there are a handful of others I would put in the same bucket, when they evaporate, when Main Street, in those small towns, starts to die off, they get replaced with Dollar General.
The thing about Dollar General, right, is that it, it is an almost perfect barometer of rural poverty. If you mapped Dollar General stores against county-level data of rural poverty, you would see an almost complete overlap. The question-- but as I say in my book, Dollar General, from a Wall Street point of view, is an enormous success.
It is the best performing retail stock on the stock market for the last half century, give or take. So, if Dollar General is a success, it seems to me we need to ask some fundamental questions about how we define success in the first place. Dollar General is not sponsoring the Little League team.
It's not a community center. It is a grim environment that treats its employees abysmally and caters to the lowest common denominator, retail staff. And, they're proud of it, right? They, sort of root for recessions because their sales go up. So right, if Dollar General is the answer to retail in our 21st century, it seems to me we need to ask some different questions.
Michelle Rathman: And, make no mistake, they're laughing their way all the way to the bank.
Steven Conn: You betcha
Michelle Rathman: And without a care in the world, no rear-view mirror there. It's just how, and it, and they, they've now come into the, in quote, "healthcare space" as well.
Steven Conn: Oh boy, I didn't know that
Michelle Rathman: Yeah, and I wanna share with our listeners, you know, a couple weeks ago, you know that we did a special event with the National Association of Community Health Centers, and we had, you know, over 400 people register.
And in that, you know, in the chat comes the Dollar General and we get a, we get a, we got a pitch from someone who wants us to have them on the show to talk about what Dollar General can do for healthcare. To that I say, "No, thank you."
Steven Conn: Yeah,
Michelle Rathman: And so this kinda shifts us to that, this next, part of the conversation I wanna have, which is the perceptions of living a subsidized rural life.
I mean, there is a lot of, you know, just perceptions that are not reality and so forth, but at the end of the day, we know that rural life does require a different level of subsidy. Healthcare is one of them, along with transportation, broadband, and so forth. So, let's talk about what you, what you write in the book about, living a subsidized rural life.
Steven Conn: Yeah. So, by the time I got to the end of this book, and, you know, maybe this is-- It was kind of ironic I wrote it in the first place, and so maybe the, the ending here, you know... And I'm not trying to-- I don't wanna give too much away here 'cause, the book is really available in a handsome paperback edition, which makes perfect gifts for birthdays and holidays.
It seemed to me that one of the other kinds of problems we have talking about this is that rural itself doesn't actually have a hard definition. The Census Department doesn't have one. Sociologists have spent a lot of time trying to come to one, and they haven't. It seemed to me that maybe what we ought to talk about instead is density versus the opposite of density.
Certain things happen when people live in higher and higher rates of density. Certain other things happen when people live at a lower density. So rather than thinking maybe strictly about urban versus rural, we need to think about low density versus high density. Okay, why does that matter for the question that you asked?
When people live at low density, it comes with certain inevitable costs. You mentioned transportation. It is absolutely true. I was in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, two days ago, and I woke up early in the morning to have a cup of coffee, and I looked out at this bucolic two-lane road, which was crowded with traffic, because people are driving someplace and some long distances to work.
So, it was rush hour in Bedford, Pennsylvania, right? Because if you're gonna live at low density, the chances that you live anywhere near your job are pretty low. This, I think, has a lot to do with the rural healthcare problem, right? A hospital needs a certain patient population in order to be viable.
If people live at lower and lower densities, that means the catchment area for that population gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And what's happened across a lot of spaces, especially in the Great Plains, is that these hospital facilities, clinic facilities close up because they can't function at that low density.
Now, the question, I think this is true of school districts, I think it's true of supermarkets, and all of the other things that rural people find lacking or not easily accessible in their lives. So, the question then becomes: To what degree do we wanna subsidize these things to make low-density living possible in a modern society?
One hundred and fifty years ago, it didn't matter if you didn't have access to a hospital because nobody got cured at a hospital. But now, right, your expectations when you have a heart attack, or you are diagnosed with cancer, are that there are ways to cure this. But if it takes you 90 minutes from the place you had a heart attack to get to that ER, well, you know, your chances of surviving it are not great.
So, right, so I think that's the question to ask: What is the level of subsidy that we are prepared as a society to provide low-density living? And I'm not taking a side on that one way or another. I think it's just a question to ask.
Michelle Rathman: It is a question to ask, and, you know, in the work that I do, Steve, we talk about, you know, a lot, you know, people don't wanna pay more taxes and so forth. And what I am very quick to remind, not smugly, but quick to remind folks is that, you know, in a rural county, designated rural, to your point, the definition changes depending on who you're talking to.
Without that tax support, you know, where will the revenue come from to pave, pave the roads, build the towers, so forth and so on? Before we, before we let you go, 'cause oh my gosh, You don't have all day, but I would love to talk with you. I wanna close the conversation, on the chapter of places versus spaces. And if you would just kind of walk through that
Steven Conn: Yeah. So I think when we, when we look out at rural, what we, what we imagine in our minds is a relatively empty place. We don't-- It's not a lot of people, right? It's a place you go to get away from the crush, the hectic, and so forth. But I think what we're really looking at is, and I use this in the book, what, what we're looking at is space, not place.
I counterpose these things. Rural space we have in abundance, and it's that 1,500-acre cornfield, or whatever it happens to be. place, on the other hand, is what happens when a community comes together to shape a kind of collective life for itself. And those, I think, we don't have in great abundance across rural America.
So, when I talk about this, you know, high density versus low density, I really think that one of the things we need to think about is how do we encourage people to revive these small towns of the sort you described in Minnesota, because those are places. and, and if we can put people together again, I think the things that we feel we are missing, neighborliness, community, cultural activity, all of that stuff has a better chance of being fostered than if we simply spread ourselves at a low density rate across the landscape.
Space doesn't mean anything to people. Place really does, and we have to turn rural space into rural place if we're really gonna care about it and tend it and nurture it.
Michelle Rathman: That is just such an excellent way to end. And, I will say, I really appreciate what you said, kind of at the top of our conversation about the again part. You know, we- we're again, just finishing the 250-year celebration, and we talk about making America great again, and I really would encourage people to read your book.
Anyone, you know, there's a lot of interest in rural areas all of a sudden. There are a lot of rural experts out there when there's $50 billion transformation grants sitting, or funding, I should say, it's not a grant, sitting on the table. And to understand again is to know the history.
Steven Conn: Yep, that's correct.
Michelle Rathman: And we're gonna make sure, yeah, we're gonna make sure that we put the link to your, your book.
I do highly encourage you to order it. And you know what? Do so at a local bookstore, please, because they really do appreciate it when you do that. And Steve, I wanna just thank you again. Your book was so enlightening to me. I thought I knew stuff until I read your book, and then I thought, "Well, there's a lot I still have to learn."
So, thank you again for joining.
Steven Conn: That's a very high compliment, and it's been my pleasure
Michelle Rathman: Wonderful. All right, we have to say goodbye to Steve, but the rest of you sit tight. I will be back with some closing thoughts.
My thanks to Steve Conn for, for me, an amazing conversation. I learned so much listening to him and reading his book, and I really do encourage you to pick up a copy of "Lies of the Land." I'm gonna make sure that we put the links on the ruralimpact.com website. Of course, I also want to make sure that I thank the National Association of Rural Health Clinics for their partnership and for making this episode and others coming at you possible.
I also want to remind you to hit that subscribe button, no matter where it is you like to get your podcasts. We do appreciate it when you leave your comments. Let us know how we're doing. Let us know how these subjects are impacting you as well. We always love to hear from you, and of course, we would really appreciate it if you would go to our merch store.
I have to, like, show you here. This is what I drink my coffee out of every morning. Are you ready? So go to ruralimpact.com and pick yourself up a piece of merchandise, 'cause when you do, you are supporting us in creating this content for you. Until the next time we are together, you know I'm gonna say it every time, I encourage you, implore you to take the best possible care of yourself and to the best of your ability, all those around you.
We will see you again soon on a brand-new episode of "The Rural Impact."
