Across the Great Plains, rural communities have been losing population for more than four generations. Today, new pioneers, enabled by a technological revolution in communications, are moving or returning to these communities searching for a quality of life that has become elusive in urban and suburban America.

This diffusion of population to rural America has the potential to become the fourth great demographic shift in American history – as important as the agricultural, urban, and suburban migrations of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries.

To understand this migration, The New Pioneers, a new work in progress by historian Eric John Abrahamson, explores the lives and livelihoods of these new immigrants and raises fundamental issues for policymakers concerned with the future of the Great Plains and other rural communities.

Join me as I travel the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska to talk to new pioneers about the choices they have made, the communities they call home, and way they work.

Eric