"At the heart of our identity lies the notion of the family farm, as shaped by European history and reshaped by the vast opportunities of the American continent. It also lies at the heart of Jane Brox's personal story - that of the granddaughter of immigrant New England farmers whose way of life she memorialized in her first two books. Brox twines these two narratives, personal and historical, to explore the place of the family farm as it has evolved from the Pilgrim's brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the small farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In considering the place of the farm, she also looks at the rise of textile cities in America, which encroached not only upon farms and farmers but also upon the sense of commonality that once sustained them, and she traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness - and its intricate connection to cultivation - which changed as our ties to the land loosened."--BOOK JACKET.