Focusing on the decades following 1790, she argues that families had accumulated wealth to set their children up on farms, but that land was not available until after the federal government broke the armed strength of Tecumseh in the Ohio country.

[4] Muir argues that, "The Agricultural Revolution saved hunters and gatherers from starving after they wiped out their bigger prey and populations grew too big to be supported by remaining food supplies.

She outlines a chain of transmission from Terry's mass production of wooden clockworks, through clockmaker Elisha Cheney to Simeon North, early mass-production gunmaker and inventor of the earliest milling machine capable of working metal.

“With New England as the frame of her loom, Diana Muir has used a single shuttle--the dynamic of increasing human population and finite natural resources --to weave the economic and environmental stories of the past four centuries in this corner of North America.

It illuminates how New Englanders, from indigenous inhabitants to contemporary denizens, have answered the population-resource dilemma and, in doing so, generated both intentional outcomes and unintended – and potent – consequences.”[7] Individual sections are devoted to farming, and to the machine tool and papermaking industries.