New England

• 1. Six States, One Identity

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  In 1620, the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower and built Plymouth Colony, the second lasting English settlement in British America after Jamestown. Four hundred years later, the patch of ground they claimed anchors a region of six states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. New York lies to its west. The Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec press in from the northeast and north. The Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine guard its eastern shoulder. This is New England, and it is unusual among American places. It is the only multi-state region the U.S. Census Bureau recognizes with clear and consistent boundaries. More than half its people live in a single corridor of cities running from Boston through Worcester to Providence. Who first drew this map, and why has its character held so stubbornly across four centuries? The answers reach into glaciers and gunpowder, mill towns and town meetings, and a culture that pairs Puritanism with liberalism, farms with factories, isolation with waves of newcomers. The region's largest city, Boston, is where much of this story keeps returning.

• 2. Algonquian Homelands

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  Humans reached the New England region at least 10,500 years ago, settling a landscape only recently freed of ice. These early communities lacked market economies, and their physical artifacts changed very slowly across generations. Agriculture and ceramics arrived before any European settler did. By the time colonists came in the 17th century, the people here spoke varieties of the Eastern Algonquian languages. Their nations included the Abenakis, Mi'kmaq, Penobscot, Pequots, Mohegans, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, Pocumtucks, and Wampanoags. The Western Abenakis held what is now New Hampshire, Vermont, and parts of Quebec and western Maine, with their principal town at Norridgewock in present-day Maine. The Penobscots lived along the Penobscot River, and the Wampanoags occupied southeastern Massachusetts, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket. The Connecticut River Valley tied many of these tribes together culturally, linguistically, and politically. As early as 1600, French, Dutch, and English traders began arriving, swapping metal, glass, and cloth for local beaver pelts. Ten federally recognized tribes remain spread across the region today, still within their traditional territorial boundaries.

• 3. Naming And Empire

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  In 1616, the English explorer John Smith gave the region its name: New England. The label became official on the 3rd of November 1620, when a royal charter for the Plymouth Council for New England replaced the older Virginia Company arrangement. Ten years after the Pilgrims landed, Puritans established Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north of Plymouth, and religious tolerance and a growing economy drew immigrants from Europe. Peace and violence alternated between colonists and Native nations. The bloodiest early clash was the Pequot War of 1637, which produced the Mystic massacre. In the conflicts that followed, hundreds of captive Indians were sold into slavery, and up until 1700 Native Americans formed a majority of the non-white labor force in colonial New England. The colonies tried to coordinate. On the 19th of May 1643, Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut joined a loose compact called the New England Confederation, built largely for mutual defense. It mattered most during King Philip's War, a widespread Indian uprising that ran from June 1675 through April 1678 and brought killings and massacres on both sides.

• 4. Revolt Against The Crown

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  By 1686, King James II had grown wary of colonies that governed themselves, flouted the Navigation Acts, and built up military strength. His answer was the Dominion of New England, an administrative union welding all the New England colonies together. In 1688, the former Dutch colonies of New York and East and West New Jersey were folded in. The union was imposed from outside, ran against the colonies' rooted democratic habits, and was deeply unpopular. After the Glorious Revolution, in 1689, Bostonians overthrew the royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, in a popular and bloodless uprising, seizing dominion officials and adherents of the Church of England. Resentment deepened over the next century. Rhode Island residents captured and burned a British Royal Navy ship that was enforcing unpopular trade restrictions. Boston residents threw British tea into the harbor. Britain hit back with punitive laws stripping Massachusetts of self-government, which colonists branded the Intolerable Acts. The first battles of the War of American Independence came in 1775 at Lexington and Concord, leading to the Siege of Boston. In March 1776, British forces were forced to retreat from the city.

• 5. Birthplace Of Industry

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  In 1787, the first cotton mill in America opened as the Beverly Cotton Manufactory in the North Shore seaport of Beverly, Massachusetts, the largest cotton mill of its time. Its advances led to more sophisticated operations, among them Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and the Blackstone Valley running through Massachusetts and Rhode Island has been called the birthplace of America's industrial revolution. Textile towns multiplied: Lawrence and Lowell in Massachusetts, Woonsocket in Rhode Island, Lewiston in Maine. The Connecticut River Valley became a crucible for innovation, especially the Springfield Armory, which pioneered interchangeable parts and the assembly line. Rapid growth between 1815 and 1860 created a shortage of workers, so mill agents hired recruiters to bring young women and children from the countryside. Between 1830 and 1860, thousands of farm girls left rural areas for the mills, among them the Lowell Mill Girls. By the 1850s, French Canadian and Irish immigrants were working the looms. By 1850, New England accounted for well over a quarter of all manufacturing value in the country and more than a third of its industrial workforce. It was also the most literate and most educated region in the nation.

• 6. From Yankee Republicanism To Democratic Stronghold

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  By 1784, every state in the region had taken steps toward abolishing slavery, with Vermont and Massachusetts introducing total abolition in 1777 and 1783. The region became the base for abolitionists who demanded immediate emancipation, including William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Wendell Phillips. Anti-slavery politicians such as John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, and John P. Hale also came from here. When the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, all of New England turned strongly Republican. That allegiance held until Catholics began to mobilize behind the Democrats, especially in 1928, ending what was called Yankee Republicanism. The shift was striking. Vermont voted Republican in every presidential election from 1856 through 1988, with the lone exception of 1964, and has voted Democratic in every election since. As of 2021, five of the six states had backed every Democratic presidential nominee since 1992. In 2020, Joe Biden won 61.2% of the region's total vote, the highest share for Democrats since the 1964 landslide. Today Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, and Angus King, an Independent from Maine, are the only independents serving in Congress.

• 7. Glaciers, Mountains, And Coast

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  New England's long rolling hills, mountains, and jagged coastline are glacial landforms left by ice sheets that retreated roughly 18,000 years ago. The Appalachian Mountains follow the border between New England and New York, rising as the Berkshires and Green Mountains and the Taconics, then extending north into New Hampshire as the White Mountains. Mount Washington in New Hampshire is the highest peak in the Northeast, the site of the second highest recorded wind speed on Earth, with a reputation for the world's most severe weather. The longest river, the Connecticut, flows from northeastern New Hampshire for 655 kilometers into Long Island Sound, roughly bisecting the region. Lake Champlain, on the border between Vermont and New York, is the largest lake, followed by Moosehead Lake in Maine and Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The states together cover 186,447 square kilometers, slightly larger than Washington state and slightly smaller than Great Britain. Maine alone makes up nearly half that area, yet ranks only 39th among U.S. states. Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country. The climate shifts sharply across the region's 500-mile span, from long cold winters and heavy snow in the north to a milder transition zone in southern and coastal Connecticut.

• 8. Inventions, Champions, And Letters

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  Basketball was developed in Springfield, Massachusetts, by James Naismith in 1891, who wanted a game that athletes could play indoors through New England winters. Volleyball followed in Holyoke, Massachusetts, invented in 1895 by William G. Morgan. American football was developed by Walter Camp in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1870s and 1880s, and the high school rivalry between Wellesley and Needham, begun in 1882, is considered the nation's oldest football rivalry. The region's teams have piled up titles. The New England Patriots, based in Foxborough, Massachusetts, have won six Super Bowl championships. The Boston Celtics, founded in 1946, have won 18 NBA titles, and the UConn Huskies women's basketball team has won 11 NCAA Division I titles. Fenway Park, built in 1912, is the oldest ballpark still in use in Major League Baseball, where the Red Sox have won the World Series nine times. The region's pen has been as busy as its playing fields. Harvard College, founded in 1636 at Cambridge to train preachers, was the first institution of higher learning in the country. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Hartford resident, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book said to have laid the groundwork for the Civil War. Town meetings, descended from gatherings of church elders, still run many New England towns as the strongest example of direct democracy in the U.S. today.