Yankee Moderns: Folk Regional Identity in the Sawmill Valley of Western Massachusetts, 1890-1920 (review)

Yankee Moderns combines oral history and the analysis of regional folklore to examine the construction and dynamics of regional identity in a small section of western Massachusetts. The title signals author Michael Hoberman's contention that "Yankee" identity in the Sawmill River Valley between 1890 and 1920, rather than being a holdover from a premodern past, entailed an ongoing negotiation of the meaning of community, place, and change in the context of modernity. Hoberman is concerned with uncovering how a community of people construct and negotiate identity by ways of talking that relate identity to geography and a history of existing within a particular place.

The Sawmill Valley, a small region around Leverett, Massachusetts, was settled by English farmers in the early eighteenth century. Those early residents chose not to move farther westward to better farmlands, but to remain in place and participate in the new economy by practicing intensive farming and entering the lumber industry. Over time, the Anglo community found new challenges to their identity as the economy continued to shift toward industry and as non-Anglo immigrants began to settle in the region. Region and identity, it becomes clear, are not ahistorical or eternal concepts; in the Sawmill Valley people were caught up with the developments of modernity even as they negotiated with the forces of the present to retain a sense of heritage and continuity with an Anglo past. This negotiation is part of the process that Hoberman calls "regionalization," by which a community draws from general (even national) folkloristic themes but reinterprets them in terms of a specific geographic context and history.

The first chapter takes up stories about the first settlers and what might be called the origin myths of regional identity. Focusing on Brushy Mountain in particular, Hoberman finds that the hills around the valley were invested with special historical significance as both the site of earliest settlement and as the boundaries of the region, separating "us" from "not us." The mixing of nature and culture, of hard work and the promise of riches, indicate the tensions present during the time of settlement and provide an orienting basis for collective identity.

The second chapter explores the oral history of subsistence farming. In the context of increasing industrialization and complexity, subsistence farming emerged as a powerful marker of cultural identity and imagined continuity. Even as farming grew impractical as a primary means of livelihood, stories about the difficulties of hillside farming became markers of the Yankee ethic of struggle and hard work and differentiated Yankees from immigrants who farmed the lowlands.

Self-reliance and hard work are especially evident elements of regional character in the tales of the lumber industries, the subject of the third chapter. In the face of growing poverty, strong-man stories signaled the centrality of this aspect of Yankee identity. Even immigrant woodcutters, according to Hoberman, were remembered only insofar as they were hard workers. Lumbering brought immigrants to the area, but Hoberman maintains that these people left very few traces in oral history. We have learned in other cases that such absences are often the result of looking in the wrong places. As Hoberman tells it, however, immigrants either did not stay in the region very long or else, through hard work, they were assimilated and became Yankees themselves.

The fourth chapter takes up internal differentiation in the valley. Hoberman finds stories about eccentrics, misers, and skinflints to be commentaries on local attitudes about money, work, and reciprocity. The chapter ends with three telling cases that reveal the influence of wider forces of change on local practices, bringing an end to some older ways of life. Self-sufficiency was giving way to incorporation in the wider region and geography. Hoberman...