Hill Farms

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.

"This is an impressive and polished work of scholarship. The depth and detail of the research in primary sources is particularly strong. The author's deep empathy for these historical Jamaicans and commitment to the stories of Vermont's hill farmers shines through." - Kathryn Morse, author of The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush "Brown frames this 1930 Eugenics Survey in Jamaica, Vermont, with the history of the state's hill farming, while reading through the eugenics team's own problematic notes to get at the world view of the hill farmers themselves. She nicely ties this story into the scholarly literature on 20th century modernization of agriculture and rural life, and then into the back-to-the-land movement through to the next generation of regenerative farmers going at it today. Brown's writing is deft and knowing as she tells this fascinating story, adding humorous asides." - Brian Donahue, author of The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord