Wood, Joseph Sutherland, 1946-

The New England village / Joseph S. Wood ; with a contribution by Michael P. Steinitz.

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

xvi, 223 pages : illustrations, maps ; 26 cm.

Creating the North American landscape

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 this village is a nineteenth-century place, argues Joseph S. Wood, and its association with the colonial past a nineteenth-century romantic invention.
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.

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Villages New England History.
Villages Nouvelle-Angleterre Histoire.
Villages
Dorf
Geschichte
Dorpen.
Landscape New England History.
Villages États-Unis Nouvelle-Angleterre Histoire.
New England History, Local.
Nouvelle-Angleterre Histoire locale.
New England
Neuengland
Nouvelle-Angleterre (États-Unis) Histoire.

History
Local history

Steinitz, Michael.
Creating the North American landscape.

Localisation: Bibliothèque main 134944
Cote: ID F4.W66; ID:97-B600
Statut: Disponible