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New England is a region of the United States located in the northeastern corner of the country, bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Canada and New York State, and consisting of the modern states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
In one of the earliest English settlements in the New World, English Pilgrims from Europe first settled in New England in 1620, in the colony of Plymouth.
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Encyclopedia
New England is a region of the United States located in the northeastern corner of the country, bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Canada and New York State, and consisting of the modern states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
In one of the earliest English settlements in the New World, English Pilgrims from Europe first settled in New England in 1620, in the colony of Plymouth. In the late 18th century, the New England colonies would be among the first North American British colonies to demonstrate ambitions of independence from the British Crown, although they would later oppose the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain.
New England produced the first pieces of American literature and philosophy and was home to the beginnings of free public education. In the 19th century, it played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States. It was the first region of the United States to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution from Great Britain.
It is one of the most liberal regions in the United States, with every state voting for the Democratic Party in the 1992, 1996, 2004, and 2008 Presidential elections, and every state but New Hampshire voting for Al Gore in 2000. Following the 2008 elections, all members of the House of Representatives from New England belong to the Democratic Party.
History
New England's earliest inhabitants were Algonquian-speaking Native Americans including the Abenaki, the Penobscot, and the Wampanoag. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Western Abenakis inhabited New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as parts of Québec and western Maine. Their principal town was Norridgewock, in present-day Maine. The Penobscot were settled along the Penobscot River in Maine. The Wampanoag occupied southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
Compared to other North American settlements, New England was sparsely populated and densely forested, leading European settlers to believe North America was a "virgin land."
The Virginia Companies compete
On April 10, 1606, King James I of England issued two charters, one each for the Virginia Companies, of London and Plymouth, respectively. Due to a duplication of territory (between Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound), the two companies were required to maintain a separation of 100 Miles, even where the two charters overlapped.
These were privately-funded proprietary ventures, and the purpose of each was to claim land for England, trade, and return a profit. Competition between the two companies grew to where their potential New World territory overlapped, and would be finalized based upon results.
The London Company was authorized to make settlements from North Carolina to New York (31 to 41 degrees North Latitude), provided there was no conflict with the Plymouth Company’s charter.
The Popham Colony was planted at the mouth of Maine's Kennebec River by the Virginia Company of Plymouth in the fall of 1607. Unlike the Jamestown Settlement, it was not successful, and was abandoned the following spring. The Virginia Company of Plymouth's charter included land extending as far as present-day northern Maine. Captain John Smith, exploring the shores of the region in 1614, named the region "New England" in his account of two voyages there, published as .
Plymouth Council for New England
The name "New England" was officially sanctioned on November 3, 1620, when the charter of the Virginia Company of Plymouth was replaced by a royal charter for the Plymouth Council for New England, a joint stock company established to colonize and govern the region. Shortly afterwards, in December 1620, a permanent settlement was established near present-day Plymouth by the Pilgrims, English religious separatists arriving via Holland, after they famously disembarked at Plymouth Rock. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, which would come to dominate the area, was established in 1628 with its major city of Boston established in 1630.
Banished from Massachusetts for heresy, Roger Williams led a group south, and founded Providence, Rhode Island in 1636. On March 3 of the same year, the Connecticut Colony was granted a charter, and established its own government. At this time, Vermont was yet unsettled, and the territories of New Hampshire and Maine were governed by Massachusetts.
New England Confederation
In these early years, relationships between colonists and Native Americans alternated between peace and armed skirmishes. Six years after the bloodiest of these, the Pequot War in 1643, the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut joined together in a loose compact called the New England Confederation (officially "The United Colonies of New England"). The confederation was designed largely to coordinate mutual defense against possible wars with Native Americans, the Dutch in the New Netherland colony to the west, the Spanish in the south, and the French in New France to the north, as well as to assist in the return of runaway slaves. The confederation lost its influence when Massachusetts refused to commit itself to a war against the Dutch.
The first coins struck in the Colonies, prompted by a shortage of change, were the New England coins produced by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first series was a simple design including "NE" on the obverse and the various denominations on the reverse. Other series included the "Willow," "Oak," and "Pine Tree." The "Pine Tree" coinage was the last type in the series, struck by coiner John Hull. Although the majority were dated 1652, it is generally acknowledged that production spanned about thirty years, despite the disapproval of King Charles II.
Dominion of New England
In 1686, King James II, concerned about the increasingly independent ways of the colonies, including their self-governing charters, open flouting of the Navigation Acts, and increasing military power, established the Dominion of New England, an administrative union comprising all of the New England colonies. On August 11, 1688, the provinces of New York and New Jersey, seized from the Dutch in 1664, and confirmed on September 12, 1673, were added. The union, imposed from the outside and contrary to the rooted democratic tradition of the region, was highly unpopular among the colonists.
Nevertheless, those two present states are reckoned as "greater New England" in a social or cultural context, as that is where Yankee colonists expanded to; before 1776. Cultural identity in that era changed once one moved to Pennsylvania, as the Pennamite-Yankee War attests to. Colonists from New England proper in that era, were rather well received in the Mohawk Valley and on Long Island in New York.
After the Glorious Revolution in 1689, Bostonians imprisoned the Royal Governor and other sympathizers of King James II on April 18, 1689, thus ending the Dominion Of New England de facto. The charters of the colonies were significantly modified after this change in English politics, with the appointment of Royal Governors to nearly every colony. An uneasy tension existed between the Royal Governors, their officers, and the elected governing bodies of the colonies. The governors wanted unlimited authority, and the different layers of locally elected officials would often resist them. In most cases, the local town governments continued operating as self-governing bodies, just as they had before the appointment of the Royal Governors. This tension culminated itself in the American Revolution, boiling over with the breakout of the American War of Independence in 1775.
Region of the United States
The colonies were now formally united as newly-formed states in a larger (but not yet federalist) union United States of America. In the 18th century and the early 19th century, New England was still considered to be a very distinct region of the colony and country, as it is today. During the War of 1812, there was a limited amount of talk of secession from the Union, as New England merchants, just getting back on their feet, opposed the war with their greatest trading partner - Great Britain. The Hartford Convention of 1814 considered secession, but failed to act on it.
For the remainder of the Antebellum period, New England remained distinct. Politically, it often went against the grain of the rest of the country. Massachusetts and Connecticut were among the last refuges of the Federalist Party, and when the Second Party System began in the 1830s, New England became the strongest bastion of the new Whig Party. The Whigs were usually dominant throughout New England, except in the more Democratic Maine and New Hampshire. Many of the leading statesmen - including most prominently Daniel Webster - hailed from the region. New England was also distinct in other ways. It was, as a whole, the most urbanized part of the country (the 1860 Census showed that 32 of the 100 largest cities in the country were in New England), as well as the most educated. Many of the major literary and intellectual figures produced by the United States in the Antebellum period were New Englanders, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and others.
New England was also an early center of the industrial revolution. Pawtucket, Rhode Island is considered the birthplace of America's industrial revolution, the city in which Slater's Mill was founded. Towns like Lawrence, Massachusetts, Lowell, Massachusetts, and Lewiston, Maine became famed as centers of the textile industry. The textile manufacturing in New England was growing rapidly which caused a shortage of workers. Recruiters were hired by mill agents to bring young women from the countryside to work in the factories. Between 1830 and 1860, thousands of farm girls came from their rural homes in New England to work in the mills. Farmers’ daughters left their homes to aide their families financially, save for marriage, and widen their horizons. They also left their homes due to population pressures to look for opportunities in expanding New England cities. Stagecoach and railroad services made it easier for the rapid flow of workers to travel from the country to the city. The majority of female workers came from rural farming towns in northern New England. As the textile industry grew, immigration grew as well. As the number of Irish workers in the mills increased, the number of young women working in the mills decreased. Mill employment of women caused a population boom in urban centers.
New England and areas settled from New England, like Upstate New York, Ohio's Western Reserve and the upper midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin, also proved to be the center of the strongest abolitionist sentiment in the country. Prominent abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were New Englanders, and the region was also home to prominent anti-slavery politicians like John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, and John P. Hale. When the anti-slavery Republican Party was formed in the 1850s, all of New England, including areas which had previously been strongholds for both the Whig and the Democratic Parties, became strongly Republican, as it would remain until the early 20th century, when immigration would begin to turn the formerly solidly Republican states of Lower New England towards the Democrats.
Aside from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, or "New Scotland," New England is the only North American region to inherit the name of a kingdom in the British Isles. New England has largely preserved its regional character, especially in its historic places. Its name is a reminder of the past, as many of the original English-Americans have migrated further west. Today, the region is more ethnically diverse, having seen waves of immigration from Ireland, Québec, Italy, Portugal, Asia, Latin America, Africa, other parts of the United States, and elsewhere. The enduring European influence can be seen in the region, from use of traffic rotaries to the bilingual French and English towns of northern Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, as innocuous as the sprinkled use of British spelling, and as obvious as the region's heavy prevalence of English town and county names, and its unique, often non-rhotic coastal dialect reminiscent of southeastern England.
New England is the traditional center of ethnic English ancestry and culture in the United States. The only place in the U.S. outside New England with a significant majority English ethnicity is Utah-Eastern Idaho—the traditional core of the Jello Belt region, whose proportion of English Americans is actually higher today than New England, with Utah being the most English of U.S. states with 29.0% English ancestry, followed by New England states Maine with 21.5% and Vermont with 18.4%. This population is contrastingly far more conservative than modern New England and is mainly LDS in religion, but its substratal cultural character is largely reminiscent of both early 19th century New England and Victorian England (due to later direct handcart immigration).
Geography
New England's long rolling hills, mountains, and jagged coastline are a consequence of retreating ice sheets from prehistoric times. The coast of the region, extending from southwestern Connecticut to northeastern Maine, is dotted with lakes, hills, swamps, and sandy beaches. Further inland are the Appalachian Mountains, extending through Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Among them, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire is Mount Washington, which at 1,917 m (6,288 ft), is the highest peak in the northeast United States. It is also the site of the highest recorded wind speed on Earth. Vermont's Green Mountains, which become the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts and Connecticut, are smaller than the White Mountains. Valleys in the region include the Connecticut River Valley and the Merrimack Valley.
The longest river is the Connecticut River, which flows from northeastern New Hampshire for 655 km (407 mi), emptying into the Long Island Sound, roughly bisecting the region. Lake Champlain, wedged between Vermont and New York, is the largest lake in the region, followed by Moosehead Lake in Maine and Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.
Climate
Weather patterns are highly variable and climate varies throughout the region. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have a humid continental short summer climate, with cooler summers and long, cold winters. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, have a humid continental long summer climate, with hot summers and cold winters. Owing to thick deciduous forests, fall in New England brings bright and colorful foliage, which comes earlier than in other regions, attracting tourism by 'leaf peepers'. Springs are generally wet and cloudy. Average rainfall generally ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 mm (40 to 60 in) a year, although the northern parts of Vermont and Maine see slightly less, from 500 to 1,000 mm (20 to 40 in). Snowfall can often exceed 2,500 mm (100 in) annually. As a result, the mountains and ski resorts of Vermont and New Hampshire are popular destinations in the winter.
The lowest recorded temperature in New England was -50 °F (-46 °C), at Bloomfield, Vermont, on December 30, 1933. This was tied by Big Black River, Maine in 2009
Population
Economy
Several factors contribute to the uniquenesses of the New England economy. The region is geographically isolated from the rest of the United States, and is relatively small. It has a climate and a supply of natural resources such as granite, lobster, and codfish, that are different from many other parts of the country. Its population is concentrated on the coast and in its southern states, and its residents have a strong regional identity. America's textile industry began along the Blackstone River with the Slater Mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and was duplicated at similar sources of water power such as Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Uxbridge, Massachusetts, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Exports consist mostly of industrial products, including specialized machines and weaponry, built by the region's educated workforce. About half of the region's exports consist of industrial and commercial machinery, such as computers and electronic and electrical equipment. This, when combined with instruments, chemicals, and transportation equipment, makes up about three-quarters of the region's exports. Granite is quarried at Barre, Vermont, guns made at Springfield, Massachusetts and Saco, Maine, boats at Groton, Connecticut and Bath, Maine, and hand tools at Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Insurance is a driving force in and around Hartford, Connecticut.
New England also exports food products, ranging from fish to lobster, cranberries, Maine potatoes, and maple syrup. The service industry is also highly important, including tourism, education, financial and insurance services, plus architectural, building, and construction services. The U.S. Department of Commerce has called the New England economy a microcosm for the entire United States economy.
As of December 2008, the unemployment rate in New England was 6.9%, below the national average. New Hampshire, with the lowest of the six states, had a rate of 4.6%. The highest was Rhode Island, with 10.0%. The metropolitan statistical area (MSA) with the lowest rate, 2.5%, was Manchester, New Hampshire; the MSA with the highest rate, 10.8%, was Lawrence-Methuen-Salem, in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.
New England is home to two of the ten poorest cities (by percentage living below the poverty line) in the United States: the state capital cities of Providence, Rhode Island and Hartford, Connecticut. These cities have struggled as manufacturing, their traditional economic mainstay, has declined.
With its rocky soil and climate, New England is not a strong agricultural region. Some New England states, however, are ranked highly among U.S. states for particular areas of production. Maine is ranked ninth for aquaculture, Vermont fifteenth for dairy products, and Connecticut and Massachusetts seventh and eleventh for tobacco, respectively. Cranberries are grown in the Cape Cod - Plymouth area, and blueberries in Maine.
As of 2007, the inflation-adjusted combined GSPs of the six states of New England was $744.6 billion, with Massachusetts contributing the most, and Vermont the least. If a single state, this would rank fourth, behind New York, Texas, and California.
Energy
The region is mostly very energy efficient compared to the country at large. Rhode Island has the lowest per capita energy consumption of any state in the country and five of the New England states placed in the lowest eleven. Maine, by contrast, had the 17th-highest per capita consumption.
The six New England states collectively have the highest electricity costs in the nation. The best rates are in Vermont which stands 41st in the country; the worst, Rhode Island, is 50th (out of 51).
Three of the six New England states are among the country's highest consumers of nuclear power: Vermont (first, 73.7%), Connecticut (fourth, 48.9%), and New Hampshire (sixth, 46%).
Politics
The early European settlers of New England were English Protestants fleeing religious persecution. This, however, did not prevent them from establishing colonies where religion was legislated to an extreme, and where those who deviated from the established doctrine were persecuted greatly. The early history of much of New England is marked by religious intolerance and harsh laws. In the beginning, there was no separation of church and state in these places, and the activities of the individual were severely restricted. This contrasts sharply with the strong separation of church and state upon which Rhode Island was founded. Providence had no public burial ground and no Common until the year 1700 (64 years after its founding) because religious and government institutions were so rigorously kept distinct.
New England and political thought
During the colonial period and the early years of the American republic, New England leaders like John Hancock, John Adams, and Samuel Adams joined those in Philadelphia and Virginia to assist and lead the newly-forming country. Daniel Webster was influential in expressing the political views of many New-Englanders in the early 19th century. At the time of the American Civil War, New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest, which had long since abolished slavery, united against the Confederate States of America, ending the practice in the United States. Henry David Thoreau, iconic New England writer and philosopher, made the case for civil disobedience and individualism, and has been adopted by the anarchist tradition. Benjamin Tucker, of Massachusetts, was a proponent of individualist anarchism. A modern example of this individualist spirit is the Free State Project in New Hampshire, and The Second Vermont Republic in Vermont.
While modern New England is known for its liberal tendencies, Puritan New England was highly intolerant of any deviation from strict social norms. During the 1960s civil rights era, Boston brewed with racial tension over school busing to end de facto segregation of its public schools.
Eight presidents of the United States have been born in New England, however only five are usually affiliated with the area. They are, in chronological order: John Adams (Massachusetts), John Quincy Adams (Massachusetts), Franklin Pierce (New Hampshire), Chester A. Arthur (born in Vermont, affiliated with New York), Calvin Coolidge (born in Vermont, affiliated with Massachusetts), John F. Kennedy (Massachusetts), George H. W. Bush (born in Massachusetts, affiliated with Texas) and George W. Bush (born in Connecticut, affiliated with Texas).
Nine vice presidents of the United States have been born in New England, however, again only five are usually affiliated with the area. They are, in chronological order: John Adams, Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts), Hannibal Hamlin (Maine), Henry Wilson (born in New Hampshire, affiliated with Massachusetts), Chester A. Arthur, Levi P. Morton (born in Vermont, affiliated with New York), Calvin Coolidge, Nelson Rockefeller (born in Maine, affiliated with New York), George H.W. Bush.
Ten of the Speakers of the United States House of Representatives have been elected from New England. They are, in chronological order: Theodore Sedgwick (5th Speaker, Massachusetts), Joseph Bradley Varnum (7th Speaker, Massachusetts), Robert Charles Winthrop (22nd Speaker, Massachusetts), Nathaniel Prentice Banks (25th Speaker, Massachusetts), James G. Blaine (31st Speaker, Maine), Thomas Brackett Reed (36th and 38th, Maine), Frederick Gillett (42nd, Massachusetts), Joseph William Martin, Jr. (49th and 51st, Massachusetts), John William McCormack (53rd, Massachusetts) and Tip O'Neill (55th, Massachusetts).
Contemporary politics
Since 1962, the dominant party in New England has been the Democratic Party. In every New England state, both legislative houses have a majority of Democratic representatives. Since 2006, the parties have split the governor's positions with Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts being Democratic and Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont being held by Republicans. The latter three states have legislatures with veto-overriding Democratic super-majorities.
In the election of 2008, the Democratic Party won all of New England's seats in the lower house of Congress, as Congressman Chris Shays of Connecticut's fourth Congressional District, New England's lone Republican in the House of Representatives, lost to Democrat Jim Himes.
Due to the liberal lean of the region, the state Republican parties and the elected Republican officials have been more politically and socially moderate than the national Republican Party, including Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine as well as Governors Donald Carcieri (RI), Jodi Rell (CT) and Jim Douglas (VT). Republican Senators John E. Sununu and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire have been moderate-to-conservative, but this is reflective of New Hampshire being the most conservative state in the region, as New Hampshire, prior to the 2006 election, had the only Republican-controlled legislature in New England.
Collectively, New England has as many electoral votes (34) as Texas, though they are decided by each state. Comparatively, New England has better electoral representation — the population of New England is over 14 million while the population of Texas just under 24 million. In the 2000 presidential election, Democratic candidate Al Gore carried all of the New England states except for New Hampshire, and in 2004, John Kerry, a New Englander himself, won all six New England states. In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, every congressional district with the exception of New Hampshire's 1st district were won by Gore and Kerry respectively. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton won the three New England states containing Greater Boston (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire), while Barack Obama won the three that did not (Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont).
In the 2008 presidential election, the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, carried all six states by 9 percentage points or more.
Government
Town meetings
A derivative of meetings held by church elders, town meetings were and are an integral part of governance of many New England towns. At such meetings, any citizen of the town may discuss issues with other members of the community and vote on them. This is the strongest example of direct democracy in the United States today, and the form of dialogue has been adopted under certain circumstances elsewhere, most strongly in the states closest to the region, such as New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Such a strong democratic tradition was even apparent in the early 19th century, when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that in
- New England, where education and liberty are the daughters of morality and religion, where society has acquired age and stability enough to enable it to form principles and hold fixed habits, the common people are accustomed to respect intellectual and moral superiority and to submit to it without complaint, although they set at naught all those privileges which wealth and birth have introduced among mankind. In New England, consequently, the democracy makes a more judicious choice than it does elsewhere.
James Madison, a critic of town meetings, however, wrote in Federalist No. 55 that, regardless of the assembly, "passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." Today, the use and effectiveness of town meetings, as well as the possible application of the format to other regions and countries, is still discussed by scholars.
Notable laws
New England abolished the death penalty for crimes like robbery and burglary in the 19th century, before much of the rest of the United States did. New Hampshire and Connecticut are the only New England states that allow capital punishment, although New Hampshire currently has one death row inmate but has not held an execution since 1939. Connecticut held an execution in 2005, the first in New England since 1960, when Connecticut last executed a prisoner.
Vermont was the first state to allow civil unions between same sex couples, and Massachusetts was the first state to allow same-sex marriage. In 2005, Connecticut also began to allow civil unions, and in 2008, a court case paved the way for same-sex marriage. In 2008, some form of same-sex unions will be in all New England states except Rhode Island, though the state does recognize Massachusetts marriages for its residents.
In 2006, Massachusetts adopted a health care reform that requires nearly all state residents obtain health insurance.
Education
Colleges and universities
New England contains some of the oldest and most renowned institutions of higher learning in the United States. The first such institution, subsequently named Harvard College, was founded at Cambridge, Massachusetts, to train preachers, in 1636. Yale University was founded in Branford, Connecticut, in 1701, and awarded the nation's first doctoral (Ph.D.) degree in 1861. Yale moved to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1718 where it has remained to the present day. Brown University, the first college in the nation to accept students of all religious affiliations and seventh-oldest institution of higher learning, was founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1764. Dartmouth College was founded five years later in Hanover, New Hampshire, with the mission of educating the local American Indian population as well as English youth.
In addition to four out of eight Ivy League schools, New England also contains the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Little Three, four of the original seven sisters, the bulk of institutions identified as the Little Ivies, and the Five Colleges consortium in western Massachusetts.
- See also: the lists of colleges for each state:
Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Private and independent secondary schools
At the pre-college level, New England is home to a number of prominent American independent schools (also known as private schools). The concept of the elite "New England prep school" (preparatory school) and the "preppy" lifestyle is an iconic part of the region's image.
- See the list of private schools for each state:
Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont.
Public education
Boston Latin School is the oldest public high school in America. Several signers of the Declaration of Independence attended Boston Latin.
New England states fund their public schools with expenditures per student, and teacher salaries above the national median. As of 2005, the National Education Association ranked Connecticut with the highest-paid teachers in the country. Massachusetts and Rhode Island ranked eighth and ninth, respectively.
Three New England states, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, have cooperated in developing a New England Common Assessment Program test under the No Child Left Behind guidelines. These states can compare the resultant scores with each other.
Academic journals and press
New England is home to several prominent academic journals and publishing companies, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard University Press, and Yale University Press. Also, many of its institutions lead the open access alternative to conventional academic publication, including MIT, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Maine. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston publishes the New England Economic Review.
Public health and safety
The six states ranked within the top thirteen "healthiest states" in 2007. In 2008 they all placed within the top eleven states. New England had the largest proportion of its population covered by health insurance.
In comparing national obesity rates by state, four of the six lowest obesity states were Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island. New Hampshire and Maine had the 15th and 18th lowest obesity rates, making New England the least overweight part of the country.
In 2008, three of New England's states had the least number of uninsured motorists (out of the top five states) - Massachusetts - 1%, Maine - 4%, and Vermont - 6%.
Culture
New England has a history of shared heritage and culture primarily shaped by waves of immigration from Europe. A cultural divide, however, also exists between urban New Englanders living along the densely-populated coastline and rural New Englanders in western Massachusetts, northwestern Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, where population density is low.
Connecticut has two cultural and demographic trends: the southwestern part of the state is largely suburban (and contains most of the state's population), alongside the cities Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, Stamford, and Danbury, and as part of the New York metropolitan area, is greatly influenced by New York City. Eastern Connecticut is culturally similar to neighboring Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Long-time residents of this area are often referred to as "Swamp Yankees." In between these two cultures lies central Connecticut. The region is split fairly evenly between New York-oriented people and Boston-oriented people. An example of Connecticut's cultural dichotomy can be found in residents' allegiance to sports teams. Television broadcasts in Hartford and New Haven typically give equal coverage to sports teams from both Boston and New York.
Cultural roots
The first European colonists of New England were focused on maritime affairs such as whaling and fishing, rather than more continental inclinations such as surplus farming. One of the older American regions, New England has developed a distinct cuisine, dialect, architecture, and government. New England cuisine is known for its emphasis on seafood and dairy; clam chowder, lobster, and other products of the sea are among some of the region's most popular foods.
Accents
There are several American-English accents spoken in the region.
The often-parodied Boston accent (see Mayor Quimby of The Simpsons) is native to the region. Many of its most stereotypical features (such as r-dropping and the so-called broad A) are believed to have originated in Boston from the influence of south-eastern British English, which shares those features. While at one point Boston accents were most strongly associated with the so-called "Eastern Establishment" and Boston's upper class, today the accent is predominantly associated with blue-collar natives as exemplified by movies like Good Will Hunting and The Departed. The Boston accent and accents closely related to it cover eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, though there is of course significant dialect variation within this area.
Also found in New England is the distinctively conservative dialect of Rhode Island (parodied by Peter Griffin and Lois Griffin of Family Guy). This particular accent resembles the Boston accent in being non-rhotic, but resembles the New York dialect in (unlike Boston) avoiding the caught-cot merger by raising the phoneme of caught to the vicinity of .
The accent family of western New England (eastern Connecticut--sometimes central, western Massachusetts, and Vermont) differs sharply from the Boston accent to its east and the New York accent to its southwest, but is thought to be closely related to the so-called Inland North accent of the Great Lakes region due west of it, to which western New England contributed many early settlers. Due to the influx of New York culture into southwestern Connecticut, local dialects are much closer to those of New York City and New Jersey than the western New England accent.
Social activities and music
Bars and pubs, especially those with Irish themes, are popular social venues. Closer to Boston, musicians from Ireland often tour pubs, playing traditional Irish folk music, usually with a singer, a fiddler, and a guitarist. This area also has thriving hardcore, punk, and indie rock music scenes. Surf rock was pioneered by Dick Dale of Quincy, Massachusetts. Jonathon Richman and the Modern Lovers are a punk-pioneering band from Boston. The Pixies, also of Boston, influenced the grunge movement of the 1990s. Dropkick Murphys, from Quincy, Massachusetts, mix hardcore and punk music with Irish music in a style known as Celtic Punk. Also, both Boston and New Haven have had a big influence on ska musicians from the Northeast.
In much of rural New England, particularly Maine, Acadian and Québécois culture are included in the region's music and dance. Contra dancing and country square dancing are popular throughout New England, usually backed by live Irish, Acadian, or other folk music. In some towns of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, Portuguese music is preserved by Portuguese American communities. A number of Portuguese American musicians live in the Boston area. The most famous in New England is world music's singer/songwriter Jorge Ferreira, from Massachusetts.
Traditional knitting, quilting and rug hooking circles in rural New England have become less common; church, sports, and town government are more typical social activities. New Englanders of all ages also enjoy ice cream socials. These traditional gatherings are often hosted in individual homes or civic centers; larger groups regularly assemble at special-purpose ice cream parlors that dot the countryside. In fact, New England leads the country in ice cream consumption per capita.
In the United States, Candlepin bowling is essentially confined to New England, an activity invented there in the 19th century.
Media
The leading national cable sports broadcaster ESPN is headquartered in Bristol, Connecticut. New England has several regional broadcasting companies, including New England Cable News (NECN) and the New England Sports Network (NESN). New England Cable News is the largest regional news network in the United States, broadcasting to more than 3.2 million homes in all of the New England states. Its studios are located in Newton, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, although it maintains bureaus in Manchester, New Hampshire; Hartford, Connecticut; Worcester, Massachusetts; Portland, Maine; and Burlington, Vermont. In Connecticut, Litchfield, Fairfield, and New Haven counties broadcast New York based news programs--this is due to the immense influence New York has on this region's economy and culture.
The New England Sports Network covers New England sports teams throughout the region, save for Fairfield County, Connecticut. Most of Connecticut (save for Tolland and Windham counties in the state's northeast corner) and even southern Rhode Island gets YES network, the channel which the New York Yankees are broadcasted on. For the most part, the same areas also carry SNY, Sports New York, which is the channel New York Mets games are broadcasted on.
While most New England cities have daily newspapers, the Boston Globe and New York Times are distributed widely throughout the region.
Literature
New England has been the birthplace of many American authors and poets. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston. Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he famously lived, for some time, by Walden Pond, on Emerson's land. Nathaniel Hawthorne, romantic era writer, was born in historical Salem; later, he would live in Concord at the same time as Emerson and Thoreau. Emily Dickinson lived most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was from Portland, Maine. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. According to many reports, the famed Mother Goose, the author of fairy tales and nursery rhymes was originally a person named Elizabeth Foster Goose or Mary Goose who lived in Boston. Poets James Russell Lowell, Amy Lowell, and Robert Lowell, a Confessionalist poet and teacher of Sylvia Plath, were all New England natives. Anne Sexton, also taught by Lowell, was born and died in Massachusetts. Much of the work of Nobel Prize laureate Eugene O'Neill is often associated with the city of New London, Connecticut where he spent many summers. The 14th U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, a New Hampshire resident, continues the line of renowned New England poets. Noah Webster, the Father of American Scholarship and Education, was born in West Hartford, Connecticut. Pulitzer Prize winning poets Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert P. T. Coffin were born in Maine. Poets Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Bishop were both born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Oliver La Farge was a New Englander of French and Narragansett descent, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, the predecessor to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1930 for his book Laughing Boy. John P. Marquand grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Novelist Edwin O'Connor, who was also known as a radio personality and journalist, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Edge of Sadness. Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever, a novelist and short story writer, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts set most of his fiction in old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around his birthcity. E. Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut. David Lindsay-Abaire won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play Rabbit Hole was raised in Boston.
Ethan Frome, written in 1911 by Edith Wharton, is set in turn-of-the-century New England, in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Like much literature of the region, it plays off themes of isolation and hopelessness. New England is also the setting for most of the gothic horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft, who lived his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Real New England towns such as Ipswich, Newburyport, Rowley, and Marblehead are given fictional names such as Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, and Miskatonic and then featured quite often in his stories. Lovecraft had an immense appreciation for the New England area, and when he had to re-locate to New York City, he longed to return to his beloved native land.
The region has also drawn the attention of authors and poets from other parts of the United States. Mark Twain found Hartford to be the most beautiful city in the United States and made it his home, and wrote his masterpieces there. He lived directly next door to Harriett Beecher Stowe, a local whose most famous work is Uncle Tom's Cabin. John Updike, originally from Pennsylvania, eventually moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which served as the model for the fictional New England town of Tarbox in his 1968 novel Couples. Robert Frost was born in California, but moved to Massachusetts during his teen years and published his first poem in Lawrence; his frequent use of New England settings and themes ensured that he would be associated with the region. Arthur Miller, a New York City native, used New England as the setting for some of his works, most notably The Crucible. Herman Melville, originally for New York City, bought the house now known as Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and while he lived there he wrote his greatest novel Moby-Dick. Poet Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia, currently resides in Warner, New Hampshire. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts for the last forty years. Charles Simic who was born in Belgrade, Serbia (at that time Yugoslavia) grew up in Chicago and lives in Strafford, New Hampshire, on the shore of Bow Lake and is the professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and short story writer Steven Millhauser, who was born in New York City and short story Eisenheim the Illusionist was adapted into the 2006 film was raised in Connecticut.
More recently, Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine, has used the small towns of his home state as the setting for much of his horror fiction, with several of his stories taking place in or near the fictional town of Castle Rock. Just to the south, Exeter, New Hampshire was the birthplace of best-selling novelist John Irving and Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. Rick Moody has set many of his works in southern New England, focusing on wealthy families of suburban Connecticut's Gold Coast and their battles with addiction and anomie. Derek Walcott, a playwright and poet, who won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, teaches poetry at Boston University. Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, whose novel No Country for Old Men was made into the Academy Award for Best Picture winning film in 2007, was born in Providence (although he moved to Tennessee when he was a boy).
Largely on the strength of its local writers, Boston was for some years the center of the U.S. publishing industry, before being overtaken by New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. Boston remains the home of publishers Houghton Mifflin and Pearson Education, and was the longtime home of literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly. Merriam-Webster is based in Springfield, Massachusetts. Yankee, a magazine for New Englanders, is based in Dublin, New Hampshire.
Sports
Two popular American sports were invented in New England. Basketball was invented by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. Volleyball was invented by William G. Morgan in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1895.
Professional and semi-professional sports teams in New England
The major professional sports teams in New England are based in the Boston area: the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots (based in Foxborough, Massachusetts), the Boston Celtics, the Boston Bruins and the New England Revolution (also based in Foxborough).
Hartford had a professional NHL hockey team from 1972 through 1997 called the Hartford Whalers (more affectionately known locally as "The Whale"). However, in 1997, the owner moved the team to North Carolina (changing the name to the Carolina Hurricanes) for financial reasons.
There are also minor league baseball and hockey teams based in larger cities such as the Pawtucket Red Sox (baseball), the Worcester Tornadoes (baseball) and the Worcester Sharks (hockey), the Lowell Spinners (baseball) and the Lowell Devils (hockey), the Portland Sea Dogs (baseball) and the Portland Pirates (hockey), the Nashua Pride (baseball), the Connecticut Defenders (baseball), and the New Britain Rock Cats (baseball).
Thanksgiving Day high school football rivalries date back to the 19th century, and the Harvard-Yale rivalry ("The Game") is the oldest active rivalry in college football. The Boston Marathon, run on Patriot's Day every year, is a New England cultural institution and the oldest annual marathon in the world. While the race offers far less prize money than many other marathons, and the Newton hills have helped ensure that no world record has been set on the course since 1947, the race's difficulty and long history make it one of the world's most prestigious marathons.
Notable places
Historic
New England features many of the oldest cities and towns in the country. The following places are replete with historic buildings, parks, and streetscapes (following the coast from New Haven):
- New Haven, Connecticut
- Hartford, Connecticut
- Providence, Rhode Island
- Newport, Rhode Island
- Plymouth, Massachusetts
- Boston and its surrounding area
- Salem, Massachusetts
- Gloucester, Massachusetts
- Newburyport, Massachusetts
- Portsmouth, New Hampshire
- Portland, Maine
Recreational
The Appalachian Mountains run through northern New England which make for excellent skiing. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are home to various ski resorts.
Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts are popular tourist destinations for their small town charm and beaches. All have restrictive zoning laws to prevent sprawl and overdevelopment.
Acadia National Park, off the coast of Maine, preserves most of Mount Desert Island and includes mountains, an ocean shoreline, woodlands, and lakes.
Additionally, the coastal New England states are home to many oceanfront beaches.
The financial magazine Money, in a 2006 survey entitled "Best Places to Live," ranked several New England towns and cities in the top one hundred. In Connecticut, Fairfield, part of the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area was ranked ninth, while Stamford was ranked forty-sixth. In Maine, Portland ranked eighty-ninth. In Massachusetts, Newton was ranked twenty-second. In New Hampshire, Nashua, a past number one, was ranked eighty-seventh. In Rhode Island, Cranston was ranked seventy-eighth, while Warwick was ranked eighty-third.
See also
Further reading
- Weeden, William Babcock, , Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1890. 2 volumes.
External links
- Political
- Historic
- Maps
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- . From the 1871 Atlas of Massachusetts by Walling and Gray.
- Miscellaneous
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