This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains, 1784-1911 (American Land & Life)

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. The White Mountains From Northern Frontier To Tourist Resort -- Ch. 1. Texts And Terrain : Jeremy Belknap And Eighteenth-century Landscape Ideology -- Ch. 2. Economic Topographies : Unsettling The History Of Early Tourism In New Hampshire's White Mountains -- Ch. 3. The Sublime And The Sumptuous : The Currency Of Scenery And White Mountain Tourism -- Ch. 4. Alone With Scribe And Staff : Rewriting The White Mountains, 1870-1900 -- Reading And Teaching Region. Pavel Cenkl ; Foreword By Wayne Franklin. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [159]-172) And Index. Presents an account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers since the post-Revolutionary era. This book gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. The ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically are explored in this account of how the White Mountains of New Hampshire have been captured in the writings of different visitors, residents, and developers, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.