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The influence of popular cartoons on environmental cognition is explored in this essay through readings of Mickey’s Trailer, a 1938 cartoon directed by Ben Sharpsteen for Walt Disney. Other materials considered include Ford Motor Company’s 1937-38 film coproduced by Wilder Pictures, Glacier International Park, which promotes motor-tourism and automobile ownership, and Ben Sharpsteen’s other work for Walt Disney. The article also examines the ideas of physical and “illusional” zoning in the city, especially the way that they were applied in the mid-twentieth century. Physical zoning involved separating incompatible land uses, whereas illusional zoning entailed seeing what you wanted to see. What does Mickey’s Trailer say about how people can live, and can it inform where people choose to live? The essay muses that appreciations of nature and the environment are influenced by popular culture.

This article considers the significance of Victoria Lee Burton’s authorship, specifically The Little House, for lifestyle preferences and the development of environmental consciousness in the postwar period. The article argues that Burton deliberately designed her work to evoke country-friendly sensibilities and ambiences in her audience and portrayed the city in troublesome ways. The enduring success of The Little House for young audiences suggests that Burton struck a chord. Burton’s origins and upbringing probably also infused her depiction of a cosmopolitan rural idealism. Burton’s importance for modern environmentalism deserves greater recognition than it has received and may bear comparison to that of Rachel Carson.

This article stems from ongoing research on the creation of penurbia since 1945 which examines the development of hybrid city-country landscapes around large urban areas that mesh stylised countryside with functional links to the cities. Simply put, penurbia looks like country but often thinks like the city, and gives a name and an explanation for a concept that had previously been neglected. The term amalgamates the solar metropolis' penumbra as an area of influence and visual awareness without defined focus. The urban fringe has grown dramatically since 1945, as emigrants from urban areas hoped that life in the country would provide a haven against the rush and thrust of life in the city. Ill-formed and dimly understood cultural ideals fuelled flight to rural areas where individuality, nature, familiarity, purity, hope and tradition would trump practical and economic considerations. This paper relates the story of the development of distinct penurban landscapes and ambiences in three eastern U.S. counties.

Magazines generate fine artifacts that can be used for cultural and attitudinal analysis. This chapter’s narrative, woven from article titles, photo shoots, graphics, and advertisements, is necessarily impressionistic in order to re-create the shifting subconscious and conscious picture-and-word collages that a natural reader would experience as they flicked and browsed, occasionally reading whole pieces, skipping some sections, and sometimes barely scanning a title. Analytical support for the narrative will come from relevant secondary accounts that scrutinize how people read and are affected by magazine images. It is important to remember that sophisticated advertisers and marketers harnessed popular culture for profit by targeting specific groups and thus helped to develop the magazines’ visual impressions while earning a buck through advertising. The overall mix of editorial and commercial advertising that was created indirectly facilitated the rise of penurban consciousness and helps in understanding its development and application.

As penurbia is a cultural phenomenon reliant on economic and regulatory factors, understanding penurban development requires the recognition of cultural factors.1 How people see themselves and their scope for action as individuals in communities provides one starting point for explaining penurbia. Secondly, how people or subcultures relate to nature and cities—complexes of “cyborgian” animate and inanimate objects—matters.2 Thirdly, distinctions must be made between the importance of needs-directed and wish-directed imperatives and attitudes given the proliferating wealth that lets people express themselves through differential consumption. Culture changes more slowly or more rapidly depending on its context, as underlined by the strife of the 1960s. Recent global linkages compacting distance have fuelled massive cultural introspection, leaving familiar and unfamiliar environments reeling in their wake. Culturally inputted ideas, then, are all-important for penurbia: they make it tick.

Metropolitan borderlands host distinct subgroups, among them penurbanites and exurbanites. Exurbia—the established catchall term for the outer metropolitan areas—does not describe the hugely varied self-conception there. Exurbanites empathize with suburbia; penurbanites don’t. Penurban sensibilities favor tradition, nature, and a live-and-let-live freedom, whereas exurban sensibilites accept trade-offs between affordability and accessibility, expect community order and plentiful services, and can be leery of racial diversity. Crudely, penurbanites express neo-rural preferences, while exurbanites are more metropolitan in outlook. The breadth between leaving a metropolitan area per se and wanting to remake it in exurbia makes a single designation problematic, especially as most people carry a jumble of traits and ideas. This chapter establishes penurban distinctiveness from exurbia and suburbia by using representations from articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times that reveal unintended collages of characteristics. Penurbia emerges as a diverse borderland zone settled by people who insist on their distinctiveness from exurban emigrants, despite living cheek-by-jowl with exurbanites and suburbanites. Two groups vital for penurbia are described and scrutinized: Bourgeois Bohemians (Bobos) and Voluntary Simplicists (Simplicists).

Penurbia owes its existence and form to deep cultural forces working alongside social and economic change. The next two chapters employ artifacts of material and visual culture to describe the background to the rise of penurbia.1 A bird’s-eye view, drawing from analysis of nationally accessible media representations, suggests that penurbia is a general phenomenon. These representations support impressions of penurbia as the product of cultural dispositions that accelerated when opportunity knocked. After 1945, popular culture became an important medium for the communication of ideals through film, television, novels, and magazine articles.

This chapter looks at how penurbia and civil society met. Sixty years of demographic and economic change recast borderland civil society tremendously, visible through collective markers such as religious affiliation, educational institutions, clubs, and organizations that provide quantitative documentation of change. Interpretive analysis helps to describe change, focusing strongly on clashes between vocal environmental and property interests, which significantly shaped local political frames of reference. Local opinion can be explored in order to describe dominant attitudes by charting local opinion using county government and local media sources. Elections and opinion polls help in assessing the effects of changing civil society on politics and to explain how ordinary people created pictures of their new habitats.

Professionals and civic activists frequently discussed the fringe during the postwar period. Planners, agricultural agents, demographers, and social activists had to deal with the disruption of penurban and exurban change and debated what social and physical transformations would mean for rural life. This section examines articles in the journals and magazines produced by organizations directly and indirectly affected as new mind-sets developed. Professional dialogues help to detail chronologies of penurbia and to understand where, why, and how it developed. Insights in the articles often emerged “by the way” to journalists; today they help us reconstruct testimonies of cultural and social change. The materials surveyed provide an informal discourse of commentary as Americans moved to the city’s edge.

Politics, policy, planning, and administration affected the transformation of the appearance and substance of penurban counties but also reflected the changing demographic composition of the urban fringe. In Howard, Loudoun, and Niagara, political systems changed substantially, partisan identifications crumbled, and planning departments grew, professionalized, and increased their remit. Incomers pushed change processes beyond the fantasy of early boosters and designers of county machineries.

Joseph Goddard (1833–1910) was a philosopher and historian of the music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this collection of essays, first published in 1862, he argues that 'music is the most original and perfect offspring of the human mind'. He first demonstrates this by comparing music with the other fine arts in their expression of emotion, and shows music to have its roots in language, as both depend on principles of rhythm, tone and phrase. He then illustrates how these elements can express the full spectrum of human thought and morality, including truth, faith, imagination and intellect, and asserts that they stand above all other art forms in their ability to do so. Concluding with an analysis of how the laws of life, nature and the supernatural are manifested in music, this judicious work remains important in the fields of music philosophy and theory.

Joseph Goddard (1833–1910) was a philosopher, theorist and historian of the music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who developed some highly influential ideas about the relationship between music and human evolution. First published in 1868, this study presents Goddard's theory on the connection between music and the human spirit, in which he argues that two major counterparts of emotion - instinctive and abstract - correlate directly with two key elements of music: melody and harmony. He demonstrates this through a fascinating and thorough comparative analysis of the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and Mendelssohn, and moves on to show how emotion is expressed in the melodic and harmonic styles of sacred music and opera. Concluding with a detailed analysis of how mental progress has influenced the development of music, this thorough and judicious work remains of interest in the fields of music history, philosophy, and theory.

Musical aesthetics is admitted to be a peculiarly occult branch of philosophy, and one in which little progress has been made. Prominent thinkers have wrestled with it without conclusive result. Among scientists and philosophers who have recently attacked it are Bain, Helmholtz, Darwin, Weissmann, and Herbert Spencer; and although their respective views remain authoritative utterances on the subject they still fail (probably because none of these thinkers gave more than a fraction of his attention to the problem) to supply a complete and convincing rationale of musical influence. The thinker on music perceives at the outset the distinction that music does not draw its general form from nature like painting and sculpture do, or from language like poetry does, but that this general form has been shaped gradually by man.

In this paper I do not enter into the details of temperament. I deal with it as a whole—as the science to which belongs that modification of the tonality of intervals, which enters into our system—my object being to point out the principle of its relation to music.

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