This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains, 1784-1911

by Cenkl, Pavel; Franklin, Wayne

• ISBN13: 9781587294983
• ISBN10: 1587294982
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781587297144
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr
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Summary

This Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire---and, by implication, other wild places---have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknap's 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and---most recently---preservation, a process that continues today.

Author Biography

Pavel Cenkl received his BA from Brandeis University, his M.A. from the University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. from Northeastern University. He is a member of the adjunct faculty in the Heritage Studies Program at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He lives just north of the White Mountains and divides his time among teaching, writing, and raising his son.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Wayne Franklin
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: The White Mountains from Northern Frontier to Tourist Resort	xv
Texts and Terrain: Jeremy Belknap and Eighteenth-Century Landscape Ideology	1	(24)
Economic Topographies: Unsettling the History of Early Tourism in New Hampshire's White Mountains	25	(34)
The Sublime and the Sumptuous: The Currency of Scenery and White Mountain Tourism	59	(44)
Alone with Scribe and Staff: Rewriting the White Mountains, 1870-1900	103	(40)
Epilogue: Reading and Teaching Region	143	(6)
Notes	149	(10)
Bibliography	159	(14)
Index	173