Common Landscape of America

John R. Stilgoe. Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845. New Haven, CT: University of Yale Press, 1982

Stilgoe's work of landscape history is based on the following premise: first, that "landscape" originally referred not to natural scenery in any way nor scenic views in general, but to man-made locales which were neither "natural" nor truly urban; and second, that until the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape in the United States was largely shaped by "common" modes based on Old World beliefs and value systems, modified by colonial and then early national experience.

Traditionally, settled, agricultural life led people to shape and order their surroundings in ways which facilitated traditional agricultural and supported a way of life which was tradition-bound, static, and fundamentally communal in orientation. These mores reinforced an agrarian mentality which was often suspicious of non-agricultural endeavors--not just trade and urban centers, but also nascent manufacturing and even pre-modern modes of "artifice" such as milling and blacksmithing.

Once Stilgoe establishes this basic worldview and tension between it and the economic, technological, and conceptual challenges that rapid geographic and economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century drove, he then moves to a thematic rather than chronological or regional schema. The book is divided into broad conceptual chapters, divided into sections on specific facets. A chapter on "National Design", for example, includes sections on lighthouses, canals, and the 'grid' with which early national surveyors at first abstractly on paper, and then concretely through land sales, neatly delineated the western expanse of the continent beyond the Appalachians long before the new nation had made much progress peopling or effectively claiming it.

In the end, Stilgoe argues that while subsequent development has largely swept away the broad common landscape of the country, many discrete elements remain--lighthouses, country farms, New England meeting houses, covered bridges, etc.--and they continue to shape American attitudes towards current landscapes and provide an idealized reference point for the collective visualization of the nation. Whether informing the stubborn American insistence on privately owned wooden homes, on manicured lawns, which can be rebuilt, enlarged, and improved easily, or providing the iconography of a pastoral, agrarian past that somehow still defines the core identity of a cosmopolitan, urbanized industrial country to many of its people, the remnants of the common landscape still shape the mental landscape of many Americans.