New Hampshire

On New Hampshire's thin, cold soil, strewn with rocks, generations of resourceful, tough, independent men and women created a landscape of meadows and pastures, of stone walls and weathered barns and clapboard houses, that has affected the American imagination.

This is the story of a historically small and relatively poor state, which seems in our own time increasingly attractive to those who seek what the authors call a simple kind of life lost elsewhere. Posing questions about land use and...