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Book Review
| The View From Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape. By Blake Harrison. Burlington, VT, Hanover, NH, and London: University of Vermont Press and University Press of New England, 2006. xiv + 323 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $65.00, paper $25.95.
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| Blake Harrison's The View From Vermont traverses the Green Mountain State to explore how tourism transformed Vermont's rural landscape and identity in the twentieth century. Harrison argues that changing patterns and conceptions of rural work and leisure had profound consequences for people's interactions with each other and their understanding of rural landscapes. Focusing on the "reworking" of rural Vermont, Harrison is concerned with the "negotiation of landscape and identity according to the context of work-leisure relations" (p. 3). He extends Dona Brown's analysis of tourism's importance for nineteenth-century regional identity in Inventing New England (Smithsonian, 1995) and Cindy Aron's examination of American vacationing in Working at Play (Oxford, 1999). |
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This reworking involved state officials, residents, promoters, and entrepreneurs who used spring maple sugaring, summer homes, winter sports, and color publicity materials highlighting autumn's blazing colors to expand the tourist season and enmesh tourism in modern consumer society. The story plays out in spaces of work and leisure across Vermont, beginning with an analysis of Progressive Era tourist promotion and its connections to notions of agricultural and industrial progress. Subsequent debates over hiking the Long Trail and driving the proposed Green Mountain Parkway underscore concerns over balancing accessibility and maintaining "unspoiled" Vermont. Changing seasonal work and leisure, the expansion of winter recreation and associated technologies, and debates about scenic preservation and the environment complete the story. In each case, Harrison emphasizes the importance of work-leisure relations and how landscapes reflect struggles over physical space and human relationships. |
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Newspapers, promotional materials, travelogues, fictionalized accounts of Vermont life, and surveys are among the sources used to explore resident and visitor perspectives. Chapters open with brief vignettes, including one comparing a book authored by a Vermont farmwoman with that of a summer home owner to demonstrate how residents and visitors shaped the rural landscape and transformed work-leisure relations. While the tourist perspective often masks the reality of rural work, Harrison stresses that to see visitors only at leisure and residents only at work oversimplifies and compartmentalizes reality. By exploring the contestation over farms, roads, ski runs, billboards, scenery, and ideas about Vermont, Harrison highlights the intertwined nature of work and leisure and the negotiation involved in constructing a rural tourist landscape. |
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Harrison's reliance on newspapers to explore local sentiment calls into question whether these publications fully represent community voices. The book also lacks any discussion of youth summer camps. These institutions helped shape people's perceptions of Vermont for generations and deserve analysis within the work-leisure relations framework. Despite these minor quibbles, The View From Vermont offers more than merely a window into New England tourism. In a thoroughly researched, well-conceived, and entertaining book, Harrison uses Vermont to explore tourism's impact on landscape, identity, and work-leisure relations in modern American culture and society. For those interested in the history of rural places, labor and leisure, and the connections between people and the landscapes they inhabit, negotiate, and create, pick up this book and take in the view. You will enjoy the tour. |
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Aaron Shapiro has authored several articles on the Great Lakes tourist landscape and is currently revising his dissertation on the subject for publication. He is national historian for the USDA Forest Service. |
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