Links...
UPNE's Page
for the Book
Harrison's
homepage
UPNE
Environmental
History
Journal of
American Culture
"In
a thoroughly researched, well-conceived, and entertaining book,
Harrison uses Vermont
to explore
tourism's impact on landscape, identity, and work-leisure relations in
modern
American culture and society. For those interested in the history of
rural places,
labor and leisure, and connections between people and the landscapes
they
inhabit, negotiate, and create, pick up this book and take in the view.
You
will enjoy the tour."
-- Aaron
Shapiro for Environmental History
"Harrison
states that what makes the history of tourism in Vermont special, 'at
least
from a geographic perspective, is what that history reminds us about
ourselves
and the
worlds we create.' This book contributes clearly and effectively to
that
understanding."
--Edward J.
Rielly for Journal of American Culture
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With
its small native population, proximity to
major metropolitan areas, and bucolic rural beauty, Vermont
was fated to be a tourist mecca,
forever associated in the popular imagination with maple syrup, fall
colors,
and ski bunnies. Tourism, for good and ill, has always been the
decisive factor
in the conception of rural Vermont.
What is surprising, however, is the degree to which we have accepted
this
notion of rural Vermont
as a somehow timeless entity. Blake
Harrison's rich and rewarding study instead
presents the construction of Vermont's landscape as a complex and
ever-changing
dynamic informed by progressive, modernist, and reformist thought,
competing
views of economic expansion, rural and urban prejudice and social
exclusion,
and (more recently) by land use planning and environmentalism. This
broad-based
study includes the early history of Vermont
tourism, the concomitant abandonment of farms with the rise of the
summer home,
the creation of an "unspoiled" Vermont
(from billboards, at least), the impact of Vermont's
ski industry on tradition-bound tourism, and later efforts to legislate
growth
and protect an increasingly static ideal of a rural Vermont.
While grounded within a specific Vermont
view, Harrison
has much to contribute to broader
studies of rural places, tourism, and landscapes in American culture.
His
analysis of how physical landscapes affect and are affected by our
imagined
landscape, and the insight afforded by his juxtaposition of leisure and
labor,
will deeply inform our understanding of rural tourist landscapes for
years to
come. This is a truly interdisciplinary work that will satisfy and
challenge
historians and geographers alike.
Blake
Harrison holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison (2003). His research and teaching explore the
historical and
cultural geography of North America, with a particular emphasis on New England, rural landscapes,
tourism, amenity spaces,
and the social contours of environmental debate. Blake has written
articles on
historical and contemporary land use in New
England
for journals such as Cultural Geographies, Journal
of Historical
Geography, and Vermont History, among
others. His first book, The
View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape
(University Press of New England, 2006), examines tourism's role in the
production of rural landscapes and rural identity. Blake has taught at
the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Montana State University-Bozeman, Yale University, Quinnipiac
University,
and Southern Connecticut
State University. He currently lives in New
Haven, Connecticut
where he is researching a book on
the history of migrant farmwork in New
England.
Reviews of The View
from Vermont have appeared in Environmental History
and Journal of American
Culture.
For more information on the book and how to place an order for a
personal copy, please visit the University Press of New England site.
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