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"Quaint, charming, nostalgic New England: rustic fishing villages, romantic seaside cottages, breathtaking mountain vistas, peaceful rural settings. In Inventing New England, Dona Brown traces the creation of these calendar-page images and describes how tourism as a business emerged in the nineteenth century and came to shape the landscape, economy, and culture of a region. She examines the irony of an industry that was based on an escape from commerce but served as an engine of industrial development, spawning hotel construction, land speculation, the spread of wage labor, and a vast market for guidebooks and other publications." "By the mid-nineteenth century, New England's whaling industry was faltering, lumbering was exhausted, herring fisheries were declining, and farming was becoming less profitable. Although the region had once been viewed as a center of invention and progress, economic hardship in the countryside fueled the development of the tourist industry. Before that time, elite vacations had been defined by the "grand tour" up the Hudson River to Saratoga Springs and Niagara Falls. Recognizing the potential of middle-class vacations, promoters of tourism fashioned a vision of pastoral beauty, rural independence, virtuous simplicity, and ethnic "purity" that appealed to an emerging class of urban professionals. By the latter nineteenth century, Brown argues, tourism had become an integral part of New England's rural economy, and the short vacation a fixture of middle-class life." "Focusing on such meccas as the White Mountains, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, coastal Maine, and Vermont, Brown describes how failed port cities, abandoned farms, and even scenery were churned through powerful marketing engines promoting nostalgia. "Old salts" dressed in sea captains' garb were recruited to sing chanteys and to tell tales of old whaling days to crowds of mesmerized tourists. Dilapidated farmhouses, "restored" to look even older, were transformed into quaint country inns. By the late nineteenth century, much of New England was highly urbanized, industrial, and ethnically diverse. But for tourists, the "real" New England was to be found in the remote areas of the region, where they could escape from the conditions of modern urban industrial life - the very life for which New Englanders had been praised a generation earlier." "In an epilogue that addresses the "packaging" of Cape Cod in the twentieth century, Brown discusses how human choices - not scenery - create a market for tourism. With fascinating anecdotes about entrepreneurial innkeepers, farmers, and others, Inventing New England explores the early growth of a new industry that was on the cutting edge of capitalist development even though its cultural "products" appeared untainted by market transactions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Between the late colonial period and the Civil War, the countryside of the American northeast was largely transformed. Rural New England changed from a society of independent farmers relatively isolated from international markets into a capitalist economy closely linked to the national market, an economy in which much farming and manufacturing output was produced by wage labor. Using the Connecticut Valley as an example, The Roots of Rural Capitalism demonstrates how this important change came about. Christopher Clark joins the active debate on the "transition to capitalism" with a fresh interpretation that integrates the insights of previous studies with the results of his detailed research. Largely rejecting the assumption of recent scholars that economic change can be explained principally in terms of markets, he constructs a broader social history of the rural economy and traces the complex interactions of social structure, household strategies, gender relations, and cultural values that propelled the countryside from one economic system to another. Above all, he shows that people of rural Massachusetts were not passive victims of changes forced upon them, but actively created a new economic world as they tried to secure their livelihoods under changing demographic and economic circumstances. The emergence of rural capitalism, Clark maintains, was not the result of a single "transition"; rather, it was an accretion of new institutions and practices that occurred over two generations, and in two broad chronological phases. It is his singular contribution to demonstrate the coexistence of a family-based household economy (persisting well into the nineteenth century) and the market-oriented system of production and exchange that is generally held to have emerged full-blown by the eighteenth century. He is adept at describing the clash of values sustaining both economies, and the ways in which the rural household-based economy, through a process he calls "involution," ultimately gave way to a new order. His analysis of the distinctive role of rural women in this transition constitutes a strong new element in the study of gender as a factor in the economic, social, and cultural shifts of the period. Sophisticated in argument and engaging in presentation, this book will be recognized as a major contribution to the history of capitalism and society in nineteenth-century America.
Hal Barron reconstructs the social and economic history of a nineteenth-century rural community in America, Chelsea, Vermont. He explores the economic hardships and population loss that most of America at this time experienced growth and geographical expansion. This book provides an innovative contribution to the history of rural America.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings by women in this society, Catherine E. Kelly describes their attempts to make sense of the changes in their world by elaborating values connected to rural life. In her hands, the narratives reveal the dramatic ways female lives were reshaped during the antebellum period and the women's own contribution to those developments. Equally important, she demonstrates how these writings afford a fuller understanding of the capitalist transformation of the countryside and the origins of the Northern middle class. Provincial women exalted rural life for its republican simplicity while condemning that of the city for its aristocratic pretension. The idyllic nature of the former was ascribed to the financial independence that the household economy had long provided those in the farming community. Kelly examines how the juxtaposition of rural virtue to urban vice served as a cautionary defense against the new realities of the capitalist market society. She finds that women responded to the transition to capitalism by upholding a set of values which point toward the creation of a provincial bourgeoisie.
Using an intensely local lens, McWilliams explores the century-long process whereby the Massachusetts Bay Colony went from a distant outpost of the incipient British Empire to a stable society integrated into the transatlantic economy. An inspiring story of men and women overcoming adversity to build their own society, From the Ground Up reconceptualizes how we have normally thought about New England's economic development
New England once hosted large numbers of anadromous fish, which migrate between rivers and the sea. Salmon, shad, and alewives served a variety of functions within the region's preindustrial landscape, furnishing not only maritime areas but also agricultural communities with an important source of nutrition and a valued article of rural exchange. Historian Erik Reardon argues that to protect these fish, New England's farmer-fishermen pushed for conservation measures to limit commercial fishing and industrial uses of the river. Beginning in the colonial period and continuing to the mid-nineteenth century, they advocated for fishing regulations to promote sustainable returns, compelled local millers to open their dams during seasonal fish runs, and defeated corporate proposals to erect large-scale dams. As environmentalists work to restore rivers in New England and beyond in the present day, Managing the River Commons offers important lessons about historical conservation efforts that can help guide current campaigns to remove dams and allow anadromous fish to reclaim these waters.
"Landscape history or natural history without humans is incomplete history," write authors Christopher McGrory Klyza and Stephen C. Trombulak. In their very readable portrayal of geological, biological, and cultural forces that produced the Vermont of today, they use interconnectedness as a lens to view the changing landscape. Sections such as "From Forestland to Farmland to Funland" describe reciprocal influences of ecosystems, humans, and topography over time. Sections on specific bioregions explain unique interactions of climate and the living world. Whether writing about the emergence of mountain ranges millennia ago, building interstate highways, encounters of indigenous cultures with Europeans, or Act 250's environmental impact, they make it clear that this is not a typical nature guide. They describe the pre-human evolution of the area and its development into distinct biophysical regions, and then show how pre-Columbian inhabitants engaged and altered the landscape. They trace both the enormous effects of European settlement, as well as how the ecosystem influenced human habitation and activity. Finally, they examine Vermont's three natural communities: forest, open terrestrial, and aquatic. Throughout, they impart much specific knowledge about Vermont, speculate on its future, and foster an appreciation of the complex synergy of forces that produced this region.
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.