Wessels Living History Farm

Dancing is an ancient pastime and an important forum for social interaction, especially in rural areas. During the early part of the 20th century, rural Americans found inexpensive ways and places to dance. In this video podcast, Nebraskans Carla Due and Millie Opitz remember the fun they had.

Every year, there are well over 225 antique tractor in the US. At each, seemingly sane men and women bring out tractors that they have spent untold hours and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars restoring. In this video podcast, we ask what about tractor shows drives men to the brink of madness.

As the most recent U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser could live anywhere. He chooses to live in the middle of the Great Plains in Nebraska. He says that I started this poem trying to write a "snotty" poem because he had not been invited to a writers event. Instead he discovered ways in which he loved his home state.

Across rural America, the number of farms is declining and abandoned farm houses are often just left behind. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser writes about an "Abandoned Farmhouse" and finds clues to lives left behind in the details that he finds.

In this video podcast, former U.S. Poet Laureate finds life in leftover fence wire, stones, No Hunting signs, dry horse tanks, and a moth harried by sparrows.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (right) finds poetry in old barns. In this video podcast of his poem "Riding the Bus in Midwinter" Ted looks out the window and imagines what would happen if a barn "could loosen itself from its old foundations and start out rocking and creaking over the fields."

The Great Plains are a semi-arid place. Water is scarce. So, folks here have for hundreds of years come up with their own methods of predicting the weather. In is poem "How to Foretell a Change in the Weather," Ted Kooser records some of the methods he's heard. They involve the behaviors of cattle, sheep, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, peacocks, guinea fowl, sparrows and even frogs (among others).

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser says he's always been fascinated by Osage, "a wood that's really as tough as nails." In this video podcast, Ted reads an ode to wood that was used by Native Americans for bows, by settlers for hedges and fence posts and by poets for wonder.

Great Plains in Winter is Ted Kooser's evocation of the silent time when snow covers a moonlit landscape on the plains. Not all of the poems of the former U.S. Poet Laureate are about rural themes, but we've chosen some of his best for this rural collection.

At its height, the Omaha Livestock Market processed six to seven million head of cattle, hogs and sheep a year. There were 300 to 400 people working to help livestock producers from 30 states and Canada to buy and sell their animals. The livestock pens covered 250 acres in the middle of Omaha. In this video podcast, both farmers and workers remember how the market operated and what it meant to them.