Reading Rural Landscapes

Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods and fields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what to look for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marks a long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps and remnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed by forest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of a long-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speak to us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads and famous sites. Lavishly illustrated with drawings and color photos.Provides the keys to interpret human artifacts in fields, woods, and roadsides and to reconstruct the past from surviving clues.Perfect to carry in a backpack or glove box.A unique and valuable resource for road trips, genealogical research, naturalists, and historians.

First published in 1999. The Issues in Heritage Management series is a joint venture between Routledge and English Heritage. It provides accessible, thought-provoking books on issues central to heritage management. Each book within the series is designed to provide a topical introduction to a key issue in heritage management for students in higher education and for heritage professionals. Rapid changes are taking place in countryside management today, making their impact on the historic landscape. In an accessible format, this volume examines the questions and conflicts that arise in Managing the Historic Rural Landscape. It is essential reading for students and professionals concerned with countryside management, in particular those involved with cultural landscapes and students of planning.

Chronicles the forest in New England from the Ice Age to current challenges

It is not only what we see but how we see that makes a difference... In his sequel to Capturing the Light, Peter Watson revisits the often delicate process of interpreting and capturing landscapes in photography. His, almost scientific, approach challenges us to see like an artist and seize creative opportunities, whilst comprehensive tools and techniques coverage allow us to put his theories into practice, with impressive results.

First published in 1999. The Issues in Heritage Management series is a joint venture between Routledge and English Heritage. It provides accessible, thought-provoking books on issues central to heritage management. Each book within the series is designed to provide a topical introduction to a key issue in heritage management for students in higher education and for heritage professionals. Rapid changes are taking place in countryside management today, making their impact on the historic landscape. In an accessible format, this volume examines the questions and conflicts that arise in Managing the Historic Rural Landscape. It is essential reading for students and professionals concerned with countryside management, in particular those involved with cultural landscapes and students of planning.

Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the bow wavewhere city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.

In the first book-length scholarly study of the San Fernando Valley—home to one-third of the population of Los Angeles—Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-theground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic western suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undeveloped spaces, these rural characteristics are, she shows, the result of deliberate urbanplanning decisions that have shaped the Valley over the course of more than a hundred years. The Valley's entwined history of urban development and rural preservation has real ramifications today for patterns of racial and class inequality and especially for the evolving meaning of whiteness. Immersing herself in meetings of homeowners' associations, equestrian organizations, and redistricting committees, Barraclough uncovers the racial biases embedded in rhetoric about “open space” and “western heritage.” The Valley's urban cowboys enjoy exclusive, semirural landscapes alongside the opportunities afforded by one of the world's largest cities. Despite this enviable position, they have at their disposal powerful articulations of both white victimization and, with little contradiction, color-blind politics.