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Book Review
| This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. By Christopher Johnson. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2006. x + 313 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $25.95.
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| This Grand and Magnificent Place examines the history of wilderness policy and perception in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Written by Christopher Johnson, an independent author with a background in publishing and environmental writing, the book's regional case study is intended to elaborate on the larger history of wilderness preservation in the United States. Throughout, Johnson asks readers to envision the White Mountains as being in tension between "instrumentalist" and "aesthetic" encounters with wilderness. This tension—familiar to many environmental historians—provides the conceptual foundation for Johnson's story. |
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Following a brief introduction, the book is divided into three sections, each with two to six chapters. The first section briefly examines the histories of Native Americans, colonists, and early Anglo-American settlers in coastal New England and northern New Hampshire. Here Johnson introduces readers to the negative and utilitarian conceptions of wilderness held by many colonists and pioneers in the White Mountains. The book's second section elaborates thematically on a broader transition in American culture away from negative and utilitarian ideas about wilderness toward a more aesthetic, appreciative approach. Chapters here use topics such as art, literature, grand hotels, and outdoor recreation to explore the region's role in shaping this transition. The third section charts the growth of public support for wilderness protection (both regionally and nationally) and the implementation of federal wilderness policies in the 1960s and 1970s. The section's four chapters explore White Mountain history as it relates to the passage of the Weeks Act (1911); the twentieth-century embrace of outdoor recreation; the development of a "wilderness philosophy" as expressed in the work of Benton MacKaye, Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, and others; and the passage of the Wilderness Act (1964) and the Eastern Wilderness Act (1975). |
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Johnson's book has many strengths. In addition to being well written and vividly detailed, it also contains particularly intriguing passages about early camping equipment and techniques, about the regional history of the Weeks Act, and about the role that many lesser-known, regional artists and writers played in popularizing the White Mountains. For some environmental historians, though, these strengths will be challenged by the book's main weakness. Johnson has a tendency to take certain key concepts (wilderness, conservation, and environmentalism) at face value. One result of this is an overly polarized dichotomy between the "instrumentalist" and "aesthetic" arms of wilderness preservation. Rather than dissect the book's core concepts and the rich historiography associated with them, Johnson often presents them as if they have intrinsic, agreed-upon meanings, both for readers and historical actors. The book certainly draws on contemporary literature on wilderness and conservation, but it does not engage and utilize that literature as rigorously as some readers might hope. |
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What the book does best is to provide a thoughtful and needed overview of White Mountain land use and environmental history. Johnson deserves credit for this; the White Mountains have not received a great deal of attention from environmental historians, particularly with reference to the twentieth century. This book should provide a valuable, lasting foundation for continued study. |
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Blake Harrison teaches course in human geography and environmental history at Southern Connecticut State University and Yale University. He is the author of The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape (UPNE/Vermont, 2006). |
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