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Author Foster, David R., 1954-

Title Thoreau's country : journey through a transformed landscape / David R. Foster
Published Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 270 pages) : illustrations
Contents Prologue -- Three landscapes in New England history -- The cultural landscape of New England -- A natural history of woodlands -- The coming of the new forest -- Losses and change -- Stepping back and looking ahead
Summary In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape? Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change. Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today. From the journal: "I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree. Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it. Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy."--October 20, 1855
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 250-259) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 -- Homes and haunts -- New England
Foster, David R., 1954- -- Travel -- New England
Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 -- Diaries
Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 -- Homes and haunts
SUBJECT Foster, David R., 1954- fast
Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 fast
Subject Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography
Landscape changes -- New England
Natural history -- New England
Human ecology -- New Hampshire -- Concord
Literary journeys -- New Hampshire -- Concord
Land use, Rural -- New Hampshire -- Concord -- History
LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
Authors, American
Homes
Human ecology
Intellectual life
Land use, Rural
Landscape changes
Literary journeys
Natural history
Travel
Landschappen.
SUBJECT New England -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
New England -- Description and travel. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85091261
Subject New England
New Hampshire -- Concord
Genre/Form Biographies
Diaries
History
Biographies.
Biographies.
Form Electronic book
Author Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.
LC no. 98039531
ISBN 9780674037151
0674037154