Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont

＂There is a stubborn myth that has persisted for almost two centuries: the narrative of the abandoned farm in the rural American northeast. In Hill Farms, historian Dona Brown challenges this notion of rural decline with a focus on Jamaica, Vermont, a small town in the hills west of Brattleboro. Through this town’s history, she reveals a more complex economic and environmental narrative, a story of the continued use of traditional agricultural methods despite the growing power of modernization and demands for increased efficiencies＂-- Provided by publisher.

DONA BROWN is professor emerita of history at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America and Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century, and editor of A Tourist’s New England: Travel Fiction, 1820-1920. She has contributed essays to The Routledge History of Rural America, New England: A Landscape History, The Encyclopedia of New England Culture, and Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory. She has consulted on numerous museum exhibits, and has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, at the Winterthur Museum, and the Frances Hiatt Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.