Howard Mansfield
Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation.
Mansfield is the author of nine books, including In the Memory House, The Bones of the Earth, and most recently, Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter which The Boston Globe called “a wholly original meditation … that’s part observation of the contemporary built environment, part cultural history, part philosophical account, and at times something like a Whitmanian poetic survey.”
He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, the writer Sy Montgomery.
Works

The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down
While reporting on citizens fighting natural gas pipelines and transmission towers planned to cut right across their homes, Howard Mansfield saw the emotional toll of these projects. “They got under the skin,” writes Mansfield. “This was about more than kilowatts, powerlines, and pipelines. Something in this upheaval felt familiar. I began to realize that I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.”
The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down is about our belief in property and the cost of that belief.
“American property,” Howard Mansfield writes, “is always in motion. The world spins; the land under our feet is set spinning by what the law has decided, case by case, over hundreds of years, to be the ‘highest and best use’ of property. The law favors active use and big plans. That deed you may hold is subject to further negotiation by parties unknown to you; it’s subject to being called in, even nullified. The ‘quiet citizen must keep out of the way of the exuberantly active one,’ is how it was defined in the 19th Century. Development has the right of way.
“And yet property is our anchor and our North Star,” writes Mansfield. “We take it as a certainty. It’s our liberty, our pursuit of happiness, as the nation’s founders said. The battles going on around the country today about where to build pipelines, transmission towers, and windmill farms show that our rock-solid certainty is uncertain. That’s part of the anguish in each conflict.”
In The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down we meet a dairy farmer in far northern New Hampshire who refuses $4 million from Hydro-Quebec for his land, and we meet a Massachusetts family whose two acres may be subsumed by a gas pipeline. We see property in its many guises. We walk with the Tohono O’odham in the Sonoran Desert. We visit a small Maine island and stand where the water will be rising in just a few years as the planet warms. There are historic moments, too: a stubby granite monument in the woods of New Hampshire that tells of the death of feudalism in the New World; the buried history of a Vermont farmer who suicides as his life is bulldozed under for the new interstate; and there’s great reform push that gave us the glorious and precarious Weeks Act which saved the White Mountains and gave us national forests east of the Mississippi.
The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down tells the stories of Americans living in a time in which everything is in motion, in which the world will be turned upside down, again and again. The book’s title comes from an observation by Alexis de Tocqueville on his visit to America in 1831, which is the book’s epigraph: “It would seem that the habit of changing place, of turning things upside down, of cutting, of destroying, has become a necessity of [the American’s] existence.”
Summer Over Autumn: A Small Book of Small Town Life
Sheds
Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter
Turn & Jump: How time & Place Fell Apart
Hogwood Steps Out (Barry Moser, illustrator) For children
Where the Mountain Stands Alone (editor)
The Bones of the Earth
The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age
Skylark: The Life, Lies and Inventions of Harry Atwood
In the Memory House
Cosmopolis: Yesterday’s Cities of the Future
Awards and Recognition
- 40 0ver 40 New Hampshire Humanities Council May 2015 The New Hampshire Humanities Council is celebrating their 40th anniversary by honoring 40 New Hampshire-based people who have “demonstrated what it means to create, teach, lead, assist, and encourage human understanding.”
- Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa Franklin Pierce University 2011
- Silver medal, in the science category. Independent Publisher Book Awards 2011
- Gold Medal for Commentary, City and Regional Magazine Competition William Allen White School of Journalism 1985
Press and Media Mentions
- “Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. He and his wife rescued the doomed runt of a litter of pigs and raised it to be the 175-pound Mr. Hogwood, a living symbol of Howard Mansfield’s care for the American, New England, history he writes so well about. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us. This beautiful book is about Time and Rocks.” --Guy Davenport, author of The Death of Picasso
- “As an excavator and guardian of our living past, Howard Mansfield is unmatched. This decent, unpretentious, wonderful writer possesses the sensibility of a poet combined with boundless curiosity and deep, deep knowledge. In its quiet, persistent, honest search for timelessness and truth amidst the clamor of our uncertain times, Turn & Jump takes us to the very soul of America.” –John Heilpern, Vanity Fair
- “Like Thoreau, Mr. Mansfield is a keen observer and, in his neck of New Hampshire, a granitic critic of the rushed life.” -- The Wall Street Journal
- "Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place.... But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield's In the Memory House." --Hungry Mind Review