A Landscape History of New England

Abstract

A Landscape History of New England Edited by Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. xii + 413pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-01640-7.A Landscape History of New England, an anthology edited by geographer Blake Harrison and historian Richard W. Judd, offers a welcome contribution to the study of New England and to the American landscape. Harrison and Judd assemble an eclectic group of scholars, both new and established, from a range of disciplines into a volume reminiscent of Michael Conzen's The Making of the American Landscape (2010), but with a specific regional focus. The book is very visual, as one should expect studies of landscapes to be, with lots of photos, maps, and figures that add much to the engaging prose by its authors. Readers of Material Culture and cultural landscape enthusiasts from most any discipline in the social sciences and humanities should find A Landscape History of New England to be a valuable contribution.The book is notably the first of its kind for the region, examining New England as a whole, with its goals to: 1) provide an historical overview of landscape change and perception from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries; 2) introduce the field and methods of landscape histories from the perspectives of history, geography, American Studies, rural sociology, plus others; and 3) offer an overview and assessment of recent scholarship on land use, landscape perception, and environmental change in New England. It is divided into sections based on five themes: the influence of identity and social memory as ascribed to distinctly "New England" landscapes; the diversity of various groups and their impacts on New England landscapes; the interactions of land use with landscape perception and the region's economic geography; landscapes of leisure, tourism, and recreation; and the importance of landscapes to New Englanders through movements such as conservation and historic preservation. The work additionally covers the many dichotomous attributes of New England landscapes: urban-rural, coast-interior, valley-mountain, industrial-agrarian, among others, highlighting the wide geographical diversity of this relatively small region with chapters covering all of these topics. This variety highlights the breadth of topics and contexts fertile for research on New England.The chapters are all well-written and fairly compact, and each is visually rich, with photos, maps, and other illustrations throughout. I want to commend each author for writing in a way that was comprehensible to readers from different disciplines. For example, Chapter Three by forester Lloyd C. Irland or Chapter Twenty by sociologist Eric J. Krieg were presented without resorting to jargon or unfamiliar concepts that were beyond the grasp of a non-specialist, without dumbing down the material. While the volume covers an array of topics, I found Chapter Fourteen by veteran historical geographer Joseph S. Wood to perhaps be the key piece of the anthology because of his attention to New England's "legacy landscape." In it, he traces the historical and geographical reasons as to why the New England landscape remains so important in the public imagination and why it is so intriguing to scholars not just through research, but also through a literary tradition, helping to explain why we are interested in New England and its landscapes in the first place. The conclusion by Judd and Harrison excellently synthesizes the themes and contents of each chapter into a whole to help illustrate the significance of New England's landscape history, its value as a scholarly topic, and the numerous possible directions for future research. …