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9780801866135 Academic Inspection Copy

The New England Village

  • ISBN-13: 9780801866135
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Joseph S. Wood
  • Price: AUD $73.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/11/2002
  • Format: Paperback 248 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: History of the Americas [HBJK]
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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 its association with the colonial past 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 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, 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.


Contents:



List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: ""As a City upon a Hill""

1. The Colonial Encounter with the Land

2. Village and Community in the Seventeenth Century

3. The Architectural Landscape

4. Villages in the Federal Period

5. The Village as a Vernacular Form

6. The Settlement Ideal

7. A World We Have Gained



Notes

Bibliography

Index

""We think of the quaint village with its white-clapboard church surrounding a town green and a cluster of shops as the core image of the New England colonial community. But in The New England Village Joseph S. Wood maintains that that icon was really a romantic 19th-century invention.""

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