The Center for Research on Vermont recently asked its members to share the titles of high impact Vermont books. The enthusiastic responses ranged from a single title to long lists. Some members simply submitted titles, while others provided extensive notes to explain why the titles are important. Some members reached back through the decades, and others offered hot-off-the-press publications.
Prudence Doherty, the Public Services Librarian at the Silver Special Collections Library at UVM stepped in to curate the list, organizing the titles into categories. The extraordinarily detailed lists from Michael Sherman, Gary Shattuck, Kevin Graffagnino and Bruce Post can be found here. Tyler Resch alerted us to The Fourteenth State, his collection of short essays on selected Vermont books.
We faced a daunting task, as 1,500 words are not enough to capture all the great suggestions. Future collections will capture important books on some of the topics we were not able to cover here, including film, art, music, architecture, literature, poetry, politics and government, and the environment.
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Esther Munroe Swift’s Vermont Place-Names (1977) contains information about Vermont places, from villages to mountains. Each of the 15,000 entries includes a thumbnail sketch, with a focus on origins of place names, unique characteristics, and stories. Reviewers warn that there are inaccuracies, perhaps inevitable in such an enormous undertaking.
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There were multiple nominations for The Original Vermonters: Native Inhabitants, Past and Present by William Haviland and Marjory Power. Archaeologist John Crock offered a statement about the book’s impact. “When this critically important book came out in 1981, there was a widely held myth that ‘Indians never lived in Vermont.’ Using archaeological evidence from sites dating back thousands of years, Haviland and Power dispel this myth and also illustrate the continuity between the ancient Native American settlement of Vermont and living Abenaki people. This seminal and still current book lays out the Native history of the state, identifying important changes over time in technology, foodways, and interregional exchange as people adapted to climate change and shifting social networks. It also provides invaluable testimony on behalf of the modern Abenaki, supporting their case for recognition, which was finally achieved in 2011-2012.”
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Elise Guyette’s Discovering Black Vermont (2010), Gretchen Gerzina’s Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and into Legend (2008), and Jane Beck’s Daisy Turner's Kin: An African American Family Saga (2015) tell the stories of free Black families who lived, loved and worked in rural Vermont, despite intolerance and economic challenges. The authors conducted extensive primary source research to document the presence and persistence of Black lives. Beck adds a folklorist’s perspective and incorporates oral traditions maintained by the Turner family.
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Members nominated two foundational works about Vermont’s involvement in the Civil War, George G. Benedict’s Vermont in the Civil War (1886, 1888) and Howard Coffin’s Full Duty: Vermonters in the Civil War (1993). Benedict produced his two-volume set in his capacity as the State Military Historian. His account is organized by military unit, whereas Coffin’s book follows Vermont soldiers through the chronology of the war.
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Members offered three recent titles about Vermont agriculture that have already had significant impact. In Seven Sisters: Ancient Seeds and Food Systems of the Wabanaki people and the Chesapeake Bay Region (2018), Fred Wiseman describes exciting efforts to reclaim Abenaki agricultural traditions. In Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food justice in Vermont (2019), Teresa Mares shares ethnographic portraits of Mexican and Central American farmworkers who support Vermont’s dairy industry. She looks at issues of food security, food sovereignty, border vulnerability, service providers, and labor activism.
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Two books stand out as major change agents, pushing Vermont in new directions. UVM History Professor Dona Brown identified Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life as one of the change agents. When the chronicle of the Nearings’ back-to the-land lifestyle on property in southern Vermont came out in 1954, it was not the time for a book about radical social experimentation. However, Brown writes, “When re-published in 1970, at a very different cultural moment, Living the Good Life would become an inspiration for countless thousands of would-be back-to-the-landers, many of whom moved to Vermont following in the footsteps of the Nearings. It is hard to imagine where the state would be today without that wave of new Vermonters.”
Nancy Gallagher’s book about the eugenics movement in Vermont, Breeding Better Vermonters (1999), documents a widely supported program during what Bruce Post calls “Vermont’s Dark Age.” Gallagher shows how the eugenics project used population studies, theories about human heredity, and a shared desire to improve Vermont to promote disturbing policies and actions that had negative repercussions for many Vermonters for decades. Originally written as a dissertation, and then published as an academic monograph, Breeding Better Vermonters has prompted many Vermonters to acknowledge and begin to address the long-term damage that resulted from the state’s eugenics agenda.
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The Vermont Research News is a bi-monthly curated collection of Vermont research -- focused on research in the Vermont "laboratory" -- research that provides original knowledge to the world and research that adds to an understanding of the state's social, economic, cultural and physical environment. Thanks to support from the Office of Engagement at UVM.
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