The New England Village
The New England Village

Author: Joseph S. Wood

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2002-09-24

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780801866135

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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.

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874
Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

Author: John Evelev

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0192647326

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Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, mid-century bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promoted in a variety of popular literary genres, all focused on landscape description and all of which trained readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed "minor" or have been forgotten by our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include everyone from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe), to major authors of the period now less familiar (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller), to those now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

Imagining New England
Imagining New England

Author: Joseph A. Conforti

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-01-14

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0807875066

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Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

Norwood
Norwood

Author: Christine Mersch

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738540382

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Norwood has long used the tagline “Gem of the Highlands.” While the origin of this name is not clear, it is believed to refer to Norwood's beautiful locale among the hills and valleys of southwestern Ohio. Norwood got its start in 1809, when Samuel D. Bowman opened a tavern for travelers at the intersection of present-day Montgomery and Smith Roads. During the early 1900s, industries flocked to the area because of easy access to crisscrossing railways and highways. Increased taxes imposed by the neighboring city of Cincinnati also encouraged businesses to move to Norwood. Norwood was soon dubbed “the city that industry built.” More recently, the Rookwood Commons and Pavilion development has helped to revive local businesses. Norwood delves into this unique city's past, uncovering the people, places, and events that have added to its colorful character. Norwood has long used the tagline “Gem of the Highlands.” While the origin of this name is not clear, it is believed to refer to Norwood's beautiful locale among the hills and valleys of southwestern Ohio. Norwood got its start in 1809, when Samuel D. Bowman opened a tavern for travelers at the intersection of present-day Montgomery and Smith Roads. During the early 1900s, industries flocked to the area because of easy access to crisscrossing railways and highways. Increased taxes imposed by the neighboring city of Cincinnati also encouraged businesses to move to Norwood. Norwood was soon dubbed “the city that industry built.” More recently, the Rookwood Commons and Pavilion development has helped to revive local businesses. Norwood delves into this unique city's past, uncovering the people, places, and events that have added to its colorful character.

The Death and Life of Main Street
The Death and Life of Main Street

Author: Miles Orvell

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0807837563

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For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.