This site was created by Middlebury College seniors Beatrijs Kuijpers, Nina Sonneborn, and Peter Davis as part of a semester-long project in HIST/AMST 0445: Vermont Life’s Vermont.

The bulk of our work in creating these video podcasts involved narrowing down our research topic. While we originally outlined our focus broadly as “small business” in Vermont, we soon became more interested in specifically focusing on craftsmanship. Consequently, we went through every issue of Vermont Life, searching for any article that we felt related to craftsmanship. The public digital archive to the magazine was compiled by Middlebury College and can be found here.

Even as we began to form interpretative arguments about our chosen themes, we were well-aware that Vermont Life relies heavily on the powerful influence of beautiful photographs to promote its ‘idealized’ perception of Vermont. Thus, we wanted our project to highlight these deliberately chosen images, too, and settled on video podcasts to present our findings.