ABSTRACT
Lucy Maynard Salmon was a professor of history, economics and political science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries anticipate later trends in social history, the history of domestic life, material culture and cultural landscape studies. Salmon's 'History in a Back Yard' essay covers residential or domestic landscapes while a companion piece on Main Street in Poughkeepsie comments on landscapes that reflect the economy and industry of a place. Salmon's companion essay, 'Main Street', shows another configuration of landscape: a dense, ribbonlike development. Salmon set the agenda for a rich vein of literature on American Main Streets. Salmon devotes the longest discussion of any element of her back yard to the issue of fencing: the social and cultural meanings of the different types of barriers people construct, and the political and economic meanings of the divisions represented by these physical markers.
