The New England village / Joseph S. Wood.

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:

223 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Md. ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

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 in The New England Village, Joseph S. Wood argues that this village is a nineteenth-century place and that its association with the colonial past is a nineteenth-century romantic invention.

New England colonists brought with them a cultural predisposition toward dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and "villages." Rarely compact in form, these communities instead encouraged 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, romantics began to associate these proto-urban places with earlier colonial village communities, which they idealized 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.

Contents:

Introduction: "As a City upon a Hill" 1

1 The Colonial Encounter with the Land 9

2 Village and Community in the Seventeenth Century 52

3 The Architectural Landscape 71

4 Villages in the Federal Period 88

5 The Village as a Vernacular Form 114

6 The Settlement Ideal 135

7 A World We Have Gained 161.

Notes:

Originally published: 1997.

ISBN:

0801866138

OCLC:

51451017