Origin Stories

Chapter 1 explores the nineteenth-century myth of the New England village. Fueled by middle-class ambivalence toward the growth of American cities and changes in the economy during the generation before the Civil War, popular newspapers like the New York Herald; authors and poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman; historians like Joel Parker; landscape architects like A. J. Downing; and popular preachers like Henry Ward Beecher constructed a nostalgic vision of rural life where the New England countryside served as a repository of eternal American values. In the aftermath of the Civil War, this myth became especially prevalent as the founding of New England displaced the Virginia Colony as the mythological site of the nation’s birth.