Quaint, charming, nostalgic New England: rustic fishing
villages, romantic seaside cottages, breathtaking mountain vistas,
peaceful rural settings. In Inventing New England, Dona Brown
traces the creation of these calendar-page images and describes how
tourism as a business emerged and came to shape the landscape,
economy, and culture of a region.
By the latter nineteenth century, Brown argues, tourism had
become an integral part of New England's rural economy, and the
short vacation a fixture of middle-class life. Focusing on such
meccas as the White Mountains, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket,
coastal Maine, and Vermont, Brown describes how failed port cities,
abandoned farms, and even scenery were churned through powerful
marketing engines promoting nostalgia. She also examines the irony
of an industry that was based on an escape from commerce but served
as an engine of industrial development, spawning hotel
construction, land speculation, the spread of wage labor, and a
vast market for guidebooks and other publications.