Northeastern United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Northeastern United States packs more people per square mile than any other region in the country. With 320 people per square mile, it is 2.5 times as densely populated as the second-most dense region. Fifty-seven million people live across nine states, from the rocky coast of Maine down to the Delaware River crossings of Pennsylvania. Yet this is also the smallest region in the United States by total area. Small in land, enormous in consequence.

  This is where the American Revolution began, where the first public school opened its doors, and where a single city's metropolitan economy rivals that of most sovereign nations. A $5.1 trillion regional economy. A megalopolis that stretches along the Atlantic coast and holds two-thirds of the region's entire population. The Northeast is also the place where the founders drafted a constitution, where immigrant communities reshaped religious demographics for centuries, and where the first urban freeway was built and then later torn down. How one strip of Atlantic coastline became the crucible of so much of American life is the question at the heart of this documentary.

• 2. Woodlands and First Nations

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  Long before Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed the Atlantic shoreline in 1524, the Northeast was home to peoples anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands cultures. The cultural region stretched beyond the present-day U.S. states, covering much of what is now Canada and other parts of the eastern continent. Among the nations living here were the Iroquois confederacy and the many Algonquian peoples, each with their own village traditions shaped partly by agricultural practices that had diffused northward from the Ohio and Mississippi valley societies.

  European fishermen began camping on these shores in the early 1600s, not to settle but to dry their codfish. That transient presence would soon give way to something far more permanent. As of the 21st century, 18 federally recognized tribes still reside in the Northeast, a figure that reflects both survival and the enormity of what the centuries of colonization cost.

• 3. Colonies, Charters, and Conscience

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  The Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in present-day Massachusetts in 1620, founding Plymouth Colony with the explicit aim of practicing religion freely. Ten years later, a larger wave of Puritans settled north of Plymouth to establish Massachusetts Bay Colony. By 1636, two new colonies had been planted: Connecticut Colony and Providence Plantations.

  Providence was founded by Roger Williams, who had been banished by Massachusetts for advocating freedom of religion. It became the first colony to guarantee all citizens the right to worship as they chose. Anne Hutchinson, also banished by Massachusetts, founded the town of Portsmouth. Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick eventually merged into the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, a jurisdiction built on the premise that conscience could not be compelled.

  In 1625, the city of New Amsterdam was designated the capital of the Dutch province of New Netherland, occupying the land that Henry Hudson had explored in 1609 and claimed for the Netherlands. In 1664, Charles II of England formally annexed the territory, splitting it into the colonies of New York and New Jersey. New Jersey itself was divided into East Jersey and West Jersey until both were unified as a royal colony in 1702.

  William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 to give Quakers a land of religious freedom, and he extended that freedom to all citizens. Penn leased the coastal strip known as the Lower Counties on the Delaware from the Duke, and by 1682 he had briefly united both possessions under a single General Assembly. By 1704, the province had grown large enough that its representatives wanted independence from the Lower Counties, and the two groups began meeting separately, laying the early groundwork for what would eventually become the state of Delaware. Through all of this, the first public school in the English colonies, Boston Latin School, had already been founded in 1635, and Harvard College followed in 1636.

• 4. Revolution's Crucible

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  The Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought northeast of Boston, were the first military engagements between the Revolutionaries and the British. The region that had nurtured so much early American education and religious dissent became the stage for the opening act of independence. The British evacuated Boston in early 1776 and moved to seize New York City, pushing the revolutionary forces back toward the Delaware River. The Battles of Trenton and Princeton reversed that momentum.

  By 1778 a stalemate had settled over the Northeast. The war would migrate south and end at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1783. But the political architecture of the new nation was assembled in Philadelphia. The Continental Congresses met there, producing the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. The Constitutional Convention convened there in 1787 and drafted the Constitution. Six of the first thirteen states to ratify it were Northeastern, with Rhode Island, the last of the original thirteen, ratifying in 1790. Vermont joined the union in 1791 as the 14th state. The first Congress convened at Federal Hall in New York City in March 1789, and the young capital moved between New York and Philadelphia before the permanent seat was completed in Washington, D.C. in 1800.

• 5. Industry, Iron, and Expansion

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  The American Industrial Revolution found its footing in Blackstone Valley in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where textile mills spread across New England. In eastern Pennsylvania, coal and steel launched the nation's manufacturing sector. Following the War of 1812, industry grew rapidly across the region. Railroads and canals knitted together a fast-growing population, and coastal cities such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia became ocean trade ports for American goods.

  The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and from there to the Atlantic Ocean, threading through western New York and accelerating commerce inland. Cities like Allentown, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Syracuse emerged as major industrial centers during this period. By 1860, New York City became the first U.S. city to reach a population exceeding one million, measured on its present-day boundaries.

  The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had already shaped the region's final borders, admitting Maine as a free state in exchange for Missouri entering as a slave state. The Mason-Dixon line, running along the Pennsylvania and Delaware-Maryland border, became the recognized boundary of slavery. Abolitionist movements grew in the Northeast and Midwest across the following decades, though some Northeastern states still held small numbers of enslaved people into the 1850s. The election of 1860 triggered secession, and in 1863 the war reached its northernmost point at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the Confederate push north was turned back.

• 6. Rise, Decline, and Reinvention

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  After the Civil War the region's cities exploded. Philadelphia and New York climbed past one million residents. Buffalo, Boston, and Pittsburgh rose above half a million. New York City reached the ranks of the largest cities in the world by 1900. The Brooklyn Naval Yard supplied ships for both World Wars. Workers pushed back in events like the Homestead Strike in 1892. Cities reached peak population and industrial output in the 1950s, in the aftermath of World War II.

  Then the contraction began. Starting in the 1950s and running into the 21st century, industrial decline emptied out many Northeastern cities. Programs of urban renewal demolished large sections of these places. The population began shifting toward Sun Belt states in the 1960s. New York lost its standing as the most populous state when California surpassed it in the 1970s. Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, severely damaging much of the coast and causing heavy flooding in New York City and New Jersey.

  The 21st century brought a partial reversal for some cities. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia attracted new information and service industries. Hartford, Syracuse, and Buffalo continued to decline. The region's religious landscape shifted with equal drama: although New England's first settlers were driven by faith, a 2009 Gallup survey found that less than half of residents in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont considered religion an important part of daily life. A 2010 Gallup survey found that fewer than 30% of residents in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts reported attending church weekly, placing those states at the bottom of all U.S. states on that measure.

• 7. The Megalopolis Economy

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  The Northeast megalopolis accounts for 67% of the region's total population of 57,609,148. The region's gross domestic product stood at $5.1 trillion as of 2022, and every state in the Northeast scores above the national average on the Human Development Index.

  The New York metropolitan area alone produces a gross metropolitan product estimated at $2.1 trillion, which would rank it as the eighth-largest economy in the world if it were a sovereign state. Manhattan is home to the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, and the term Wall Street has become effectively synonymous with global finance. Companies based in the New York area include Verizon, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, MetLife, PepsiCo, IBM, Goldman Sachs, and Pfizer.

  Philadelphia's metropolitan area produces a gross metropolitan product of $479 billion, ranking it ninth largest in the United States. Boston serves as a global headquarters for companies including General Electric and Liberty Mutual. Across the region, the median household income in 2021 was $77,142 and the median family income was $97,347, with about 11.9% of the population living below the poverty line. Rural states like Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire draw heavily on agriculture, logging, mining, and tourism, and Maine's logging industry forms a substantial share of its northern economy. New York's per capita GDP as of 2022 stood at $105,226, the highest among the Northeastern states.

• 8. Crossing Points and Transit

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  Pennsylvania Station in New York City handled more than 10 million Amtrak passengers in 2019, making it the busiest train station in North America. The New York City Subway carries annual ridership of more than 2.7 billion. The George Washington Bridge, which connects New York and New England to New Jersey and cross-country Interstate 80, is one of the busiest crossings in the United States.

  The region has been the site of transportation firsts since the 19th century. The first commercial railroad in the U.S. ran in Milton, Massachusetts. The first rapid transit system was the MBTA Green Line. The Bronx River Parkway, opened in 1922, was the first limited-access road in the country. The first major urban freeway was the FDR Drive in Manhattan, built in the late 1930s.

  The Northeast also produced some of the most consequential highway revolts in American history. Proposed highways through Greenwich Village and the Inner Belt in Boston were cancelled due to fierce public opposition. The Big Dig in Boston tore down the elevated Central Artery and tunneled it underground, becoming one of the costliest construction projects in the world at $21 billion adjusted to 2020 inflation. The former highway's footprint became the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Rochester, New York later demolished the Inner Loop to reunify neighborhoods and create developable land. These choices shaped a region that now has one of the highest transit usage rates in North America, with the Long Island Rail Road serving as the most-used commuter rail line on the continent.