Tin Pan Blues |
Monday, March 24, 2008
Other landscape books: What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Wormsloe Foundation Publications) (Paperback) by Mart A. Stewart (Author) The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (Hardcover) by Conevery Bolton Valencius (Author) "MOVEMENT PERVADED NINETEENTH-CENTURY American life... This book is based on the author's Harvard dissertation, which won the 1999 Allan Nevins Prize. (Valencius is currently on the history faculty of Washington University in Saint Louis.) While Jacqueline Corn's Environment and Health in Nineteenth Century America focuses on Pennsylvania, this work looks at antebellum westward migration, with particular emphasis on Arkansas and Missouri. Settlers of both European and African extraction assessed the environment in a variety of ways, including its effect on their health. Letters, newspapers, journals, and literature all reveal sentiments ranging from "this is a healthy country," as one satisfied newcomer put it, to "I think it is a sickly place," as a more tremulous settler wrote in a letter home. Valencius suggests that the ideas and practices linking human well-being and locale were fundamentally identical processes with those thought to operate in the natural world. For example, in the release of foul miasmas from soil disturbed by cultivation, settlers perceived the same cycle of imbalance and reequilibrium that they experienced in the release of "bad humors" from their own ill bodies. A Historical Perspective on Form and Function in Upper Midwest Rural Settlement Hildegard Binder Johnson Agricultural History, Vol. 48, No. 1, Farming in the Midwest, 1840-1900: A Symposium. (Jan., 1974), pp. 11-25. JSTOR Stable URL:
The annotated bibliography in the back of Understanding Ordinary Landscapes contains a variety of interesting references on the interpretation of settlement culture. Among these are: John R. Borchert, _America's Northern Heartland: An Economic and Historical Geography_ (1987) Michael P. Conzen, ed., _The Making of the American Landscape_ (1990) Cole Harris, "Power, Modernity, and Historical Geography," _Journal of the Association of American Geographers_ 81:4 (1991), 671-83. John Fraser Hart, "The Middle West," _Annals of the Association of American Geographers" 62 (1972(), 258-82. Sally McMurry, "Women in the American Vernacular Landscape," _material Culture_ (20:1, 1989), 33-49. (And JSTOR returned Reviewed Work(s): Landscape Archaeology: Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape by Rebecca Yamin; Karen Bescherer Metheny; 2. Grammar, Codes, and Performance: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Models in the Study of Vernacular Architecture Michael Ann Williams; M. Jane Young Stable URL: ) Sally Ann McMurry, _Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change_ (Oxford, 1988) John Fraser Hart, "Field Patterns in Indiana," _Geographical Review_ 58 (1968) 450-471. John Brinkerhoff Jackson, "The Virginian Heritage: Fencing, Farming, and Cattle-Raising" in his _Landscape in Sight_. Milton B. Newton, Jr., "Settlement Patterns as Artifacts of Social Structure" in Miles Richardson, ed., _The Human Mirror: Material and Spatial Images of Man." (1974). Camille Wells, "The Planter's Prospect: Houses, Outbuildings, and Rural Landscapes in Eighteenth Century Virginia," _Winterthur Portfolio_ 28 (1993), 1-31. (Which found: 1. Using Historical Landscape to Stimulate Historical Imagination: A Memoir of Climbing outside the Box James P. Whittenburg Stable URL: Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," JAH 76 (1990) 1087-1106. Michael P. Conzen, "The Morphology of Nineteenth-Century American Cities," in Woodrow Borah, et al, _Urbanization in the Americas_ (1980). James E. Vance, Jr., _The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization_ (1990) |
