Two Vermonts establishes a little-known fact about Vermont: that the state's fascination with tourism as a savior for a suffering economy is more than a century old, and that this interest in tourism has always been dogged by controversy. Through this lens, the book is poised to take its place as the standard work on Vermont in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Searls examines the origins of Vermont's contemporary identity and some reasons why that identity ("Who is a Vermonter?") is to this day so hotly contested. Searls divides nineteenth-century Vermonters into conceptually "uphill," or rural/parochial, and "downhill," or urban/cosmopolitan, elements. These two groups, he says, negotiated modernity in distinct and contrary ways. The dissonance between their opposing tactical approaches to progress and change belied the pastoral ideal that contemporary urban Americans had come to associate with the romantic notion of "Vermont." Downhill Vermonters, espousing a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between tradition and progress, unilaterally endeavored to foster the pastoral ideal as a means of stimulating economic development. The hostile uphill resistance to this strategy engendered intense social conflict over issues including education, religion, and prohibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story of Vermont's vigorous nineteenth-century quest for a unified identity bears witness to the stirring and convoluted forging of today's "Vermont." Searls's engaging exploration of this period of Vermont's history advances our understanding of the political, economic, and cultural transformation of all of rural America as industrial capitalism and modernity revolutionized the United States between 1865 and 1910. By the late Progressive Era, Vermont's reputation was rooted in the national yearning to keep society civil, personal, and meaningful in a world growing more informal, bureaucratic, and difficult to navigate. The fundamental ideological differences among Vermont communities are indicative of how elusive and frustrating efforts to balance progress and tradition were in the context of effectively negotiating capitalist transformation in contemporary America.

The green mountains, lush valleys and riotous fall colors of idyllic nineteenth-century Vermont masked a sinister underbelly. By 1900, the state was in the throes of a widespread opium epidemic that saw more than 3.3 million doses of the drug being distributed to inhabitants each and every month. Decades of infighting within the medical profession, complicit doctors and druggists, unrestricted access to opium and bogus patent medicines all contributed to the problem. Those conflicts were compounded by a hands-off legislature focused on prohibiting the consumption of alcohol. Historian Gary G. Shattuck traces this unusual aspect of Vermont's past. Book jacket.

Pulling Up Roots: Book One follows a remarkable line of descent of Edmund Rootes, an educated gentleman who died penniless on September 13, 1613 in Ashford, England, leaving his young family in desperate financial circumstances. The Rootes family suffered but persevered. In 1635, Edmund’s three sons, Puritans, after enduring years of religious oppression, left England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Upon their arrival in America, the Rootes boys settled in Salem, then more shantytown than village. Over the next fifty years, Salem grew into a commercially important seaport—and a troubled community that would become forever infamous for its witch trials and public executions in 1692. Among those falsely accused and cruelly punished was elderly Susannah Rootes. By the end of the 17th century, the Rootes family had uprooted again, moving away from Massachusetts, first to Connecticut and then on to the wilderness of Vermont. The Rootes family story provides a unique look at the evolution of America from a fragile English outpost to an independent nation—seen from the perspective of one family compelled by circumstances and chance to continue moving on and experiencing more of the young and growing country. A family history—particularly one going back centuries—faces the difficult task of telling the stories of people who are now largely unknowable. This book begins with Edmund Rootes. Who was he really? What was he like? Kind or callous? Good-natured or sullen? Handsome or hideous? We cannot know. But we can draw inferences by learning more about what these long-gone people experienced. By examining shreds of evidence from aged records and linking them with the sweep history, the dead gradually come into focus. Christopher Eiben is a writer and historical researcher who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.