Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century

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 fixtu...