This groundbreaking book explores the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley over the past one hundred years from America's largest fruit-producing region into the technology capital of the world. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the region's focus shifted from fruits—such as apricots and prunes—to computers. Both personal and public rhetoric reveals how a sense of place emerges and changes in an evolving agricultural community like the Santa Clara Valley.

Through extensive archival research and interviews, Anne Marie Todd explores the concepts of place and placelessness, arguing that place is more than a physical location and that exploring a community's sense of place can help us to map how individuals experience their natural surroundings and their sense of responsibility towards the local environment. Todd extends the concept of sense of place to describe Silicon Valley as a non-place, where weakened or disrupted attachment to place threatens the environment and community. The story of the Santa Clara Valley is an American story of the development of agricultural lands and the transformation of rural regions.

Reviews

“This evocative story, backed by extensive research and scholarly support, represents one of the deeper dives into a place I have ever encountered. It is quite readable by both academic and laypersons’ standards. The author’s analysis is just as sweeping as her depictions of the Santa Clara Valley.”

—James G. Cantrill, Professor of Communication Studies, Northern Michigan University

“This skillfully written biography of the Santa Clara Valley landscape offers a theoretical framework for exploring place. Through in-depth interviews the voices of those who lived the history of the Valley of Heart's Delight speak their truth regarding how they came to know the land and how the land shaped their relationship to the environment. The analysis offers a template for understanding the transformation of agricultural landscapes to industrial spaces and how that impacted the human sense of place, community, and relationship to nature.”

—Barbara Willard, Associate Professor of Environmental Communication, DePaul University

“Todd’s Valley of Heart's Delight is a rich, vivid rhetorical history through the imagined, contested, evolving, and forgotten sense of place of a region transformed, and transformed anew. Through rigorous archival work and interviews, Todd’s fascinating journey, across time and grounded in place, encourages readers to pause and reflect on the dynamic routes and roots of lived experience, and on how the work of collective stories might help imagine pathways forward for living and thinking ecologically.”

—Brian Cozen, Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication, California State University, Fresno

“Valley of Heart's Delight is a wonderful example of how to write a rhetorical history of place. Using the Santa Clara Valley as a site of exploration, Anne Marie Todd takes us through three case studies as she traces what happened to the valley over time. Her suggestion that Silicon Valley is more of a ‘non-place’ than anything else, and that the ‘heritage discourse’ may be a promising alternative construction, will surely pique the interests of scholars for years to come.”

—Richard Besel, coeditor of Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse

“This book underscores sense of place as an invaluable but underexamined concept for the understanding and weighing the rhetorical and ecocultural bases of regional history. Its analysis of a shifting dynamic between environmental and agricultural narratives at the meeting grounds of urban and rural, and public and personal has wide relevance.”

—Norie Ross Singer, lead author of Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America

“From historical artifacts to contemporary rhetorical theories, Todd integrates an impressive amount of information; the result is a thoroughly supported interpretation of the character of this valley and how it is has changed over time.”

—Samantha Senda-Cook, coeditor of Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches