Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.
(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)
Back up on brushy: Folk regional identity in the Sawmill Valley of western Massachusetts, 1890-1920
Abstract
This project focuses on the cultural fault lines that converged in the years between 1890 and 1920 to create a dynamic sense of folk regional identity among the people of western Massachusetts' Sawmill Valley. The key to the study is its thematic attention to the often conflicting uses of place and landscape within the oral traditions that I have collected from local residents over the last two years. In comparison to the urban and suburban sprawl which lie within less than a half hour's drive of it, the Sawmill Valley now appears to be a last vestige of the old, pastoral New England out of which many American myths of consensus have been made; this dissertation is concerned with dismantling such appearances. Far from being secure vestiges of old Yankee stability or self-sufficiency, the Valley's folk traditions functioned during the turn-of-the-century period as highly self-conscious reactions to events which were occuring both within and just beyond the region's immediate borders. The gradual influx of an immigrant (primarily French Canadian) population into this already dynamic rural/industrial corridor during the period 1890-1920, as well as the Valley's growing dependence on the Connecticut Valley's market-economy, provides a suitably volatile focal point for the study, an appropriate moment of cultural re-definition and upheaval.
Subject Area
Folklore|American studies|Cultural anthropology
Recommended Citation
Hoberman, Michael Brian, "Back up on brushy: Folk regional identity in the Sawmill Valley of western Massachusetts, 1890-1920" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9408287.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9408287