The New England village / Joseph S. Wood with a contribution by Michael Steinitz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wood, Joseph Sutherland, 1946-

Contributor:

Steinitz, Michael.

Series:

Creating the North American landscape

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Villages--New England--History.

Villages.

Local history.

History.

New England--History, Local.

New England.

Physical Description:

xvi, 223 pages : illustrations, maps ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Md : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Summary:

The New England village, with its white-painted, black-shuttered, classical-revival buildings surrounding a tree-shaded green, is one of the enduring icons of the American historical imagination. Associated in the popular mind with a time of strong community values, discipline, and economic stability, the village of New England is for many the archetypal "city on a hill". Yet this village is a nineteenth-century place, argues Joseph S. Wood, and its association with the colonial past a nineteenth-century romantic invention.

New England colonists, Wood argues, brought with them a cultural predisposition toward dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and "villages". Rarely compact in form, these communities did, however, encourage individual landholding. By the early nineteenth century, town centers, where meetinghouses stood, began to develop into the center villages we recognize today. Just as rural New England began its economic decline, Wood shows, romantics associated these proto-urban places with idealized colonial village communities as the source of both village form and commercial success.

This provocative assessment of the New England village encourages critical thinking about landscape origins and meanings ascribed to them by different people in different periods. We invent the past, Wood concludes, in our own image -- as nineteenth-century villagers did quite literally and as suburban developers do today. The New England Village will be of interest not only to students and scholars of landscape history but also to those associated with tourism, living museums, and historic preservation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0801854547

OCLC:

35138236