Inventing New England; Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century by Dona Brown (review)

170 Canadian Review of American Studies of that plague, "agribusiness," and to join in the battle with the ordinary men and women of the early part of this century to preserve the family farm; the author envisions a "new agriculture" in which the old social arrangementmutuality and interdependence within the household and community-is recreated . Policy makers in Washington today who see government farm supports as having contradicted market forces for the last forty years will share neither Neth's diagnosis nor her antidote. Serious rural historians will certainly welcome the former, and perhaps the latter. Royden Loewen University of Manitoba Dona Brown. Inventing New England; Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Pp. 253. In this insightful study, historian Dona Brown explores the ways in which the tourist industry shaped the land and people of nineteenth-century New England. Drawing upon guide books, travel literature, guest registries, local histories and newspapers, Brown traces the evolution of tourism from the fashionable tour of the 1820s through to the farm and colonial vacations popular at century's end. In the process we see a region once noted for its cities and industries and commitment to progress and innovation transformed into a rural refuge from the modern world. Throughout her study, Brown stresses that the tourist industry was not primarily a product of the region's geography or history, but rather, the result of human decisions which encoded meaning on the landscape and people to promote saleable imagery and to satisfy the needs of the consumers. Inventing New England is organized around a series of case studies which explore tourism's vital role in the economy, its impact upon the culture and landscape of the region, and its relationship to an emerging middle class. Brown demonstrates in her first chapter that tourism was at the cutting edge of capitalist development in New England. The commercialization of tourism at the beginning of the century supported the extension of transportation systems, opened up new hinterlands for development, promoted land speculation and construction, created a large market for guide books, prints BookReviews 171 and travel literature, and contributed to the spread of market relations. Brown's second chapter on scenic touring in the White Mountains at midcentury explores the links between landscape, nationalism, and middle-class needs and sensibilities. She convincingly argues that the nationalist desire to create an American landscape as romantic as that of Europe and the association of the proper appreciation of scenery with claims to social status combined to create a market for scenery. While the scenic conventions of the period created the illusion of distancing the tourist experience from commercial considerations, Brown contends that these aesthetics in fact inspired consumption and contributed to the spread of consumer capitalism. The commodification process applied not only to places but to people as well. In chapter three, Brown examines the cottage communities of Martha's Vineyard and explores how tourism and concepts of Christian leisure played a vital role in creating a consumer-oriented society by transforming middleclass values. The use of tourism to resurrect the failing economies of communities such as Nantucket is examined in chapter four. Brown explores the ambivalent impact of an economic strategy which transformed local mannerisms, dialects, and customs into marketable commodities. In chapter five, Brown attributes the popularity of the farm vacation late in the century to official efforts to reverse the decline of rural New England and the middle-class search for refuge from an increasingly complex and industrial world. She deftly analyzes the tensions that existed between the expectations of tourists, the realities of farm life and the identity of the farm family. In her final substantive chapter, Brown explores how middle-class concerns about race and class contributed to the colonial revival at the turn of the century. She observes that the summer residences of coastal towns such as York and Kittery in Maine founded local historical and genealogical societies hoping to recapture the class stability, social harmony, and ethnic homogeneity which they believed characterized the colonial era. Such people, Brown concludes, were not simply consumers of local history but creators of a useable past. Brown has produced...