1.1 billion years ago as collisions from Texas to Quebec were creating Grenville mountain belts, a large mid-continent rift system developed that extended from the Lake Superior Region down into the Great Plains. Despite being active for ~15 million years, the rift system ultimately failed to dismember North America. Today, the voluminous igneous and sedimentary rocks associated with the rift are an important repository of information regarding continental drift and geomagnetic field behavior during a critical time in Earth history when the continents were assembling to form the supercontinent Rodinia. Until recently, the meaning of paleomagnetic directions from the rift was murky due to the belief that changes in paleomagnetic direction were a result of geomagnetic reversal asymmetry rather than plate motion. If indeed the geomagnetic field at the time was significantly more complicated than a dipole, efforts to construct the paleogeography of Rodinia, or confidently interpret the paleolatitude of sedimentary deposits of climatic relevance, would be hindered. Recent work from the most complete stratigraphic exposure of the rift has led to a high-resolution paleomagnetic data set that shows previously interpreted reversal asymmetry to be an artifact of rapid motion of North America and associated continental land masses during the time period.