Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century. By Joseph A. Conforti. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 400 pages. $49.95 (hardcover).Using a wide variety of cultural artifactspromotional literature, Puritan spiritual histories, works of geography, fiction, visual artifacts, and magazines-Joseph A. Conforti traces New England's evolution from the first generation of Puritans down through the first half of the twentieth century. Imagining New England is a cultural history that contends "both on the ground and in the country of the imagination New England has been an ever-changing region" (315). The crux of his argument, however, relies on the works of a few carefully selected and elaborately explained cultural interpreters whose works illustrate the shifting conceptions of the region.Central to New England regional identity were the Puritans and their sense of mission to the New World. The first generation of New Englanders did not conceive of themselves as "New Englanders;" rather, they viewed their settlement as a middling sort of "second England," religiously reformed and modified to conform more closely to the idealized days of the English past. Succeeding generations mythologized the first as a "Great Migration" of heroic, inspirational figures whose errand into the wilderness brought forth a new English "Israel" worthy of honor and emulation. This sense of regional pride and exceptionalism was wedded to a re-Anglicized identification with the glory of the British Empire transformed by the political legacy of the Glorious Revolution and the material prosperity of the consumer revolution. The New England region, in their eyes, was a place apart from England and the rest of the colonies, but not too far apart.With the political and social upheaval of the American Revolution and independence, New Englanders' sense of place began to drift from its religious moorings. Concern with the difficulties of fashioning a republic of virtue led them to fashion a "republicanized" version of the Puritan past, one that set New Englanders up as a political city on a hill for the new nation to follow. Led by the Rev. Jebidiah Morse's highly political work in cultural geography and echoed by Timothy Dwight's musings in his Travels, New Englanders came to see themselves as a model of the kind of republican virtue needed to sustain the new nation. The New England heritage of community life centered on town meetings, churches, schools, and militias provided a model that could serve as an example for the other regions to follow.In the mid-to-late 1800s, New England's self-image shifted again, this time as a result of three key cultural inventions. First, there was the invention of the ideal orderly community-the white village with its churches, picket fences, and ample commons. Inhabiting these communities were the Yankees, men and women known for their republican virtues of self-denial, restraint, order, frugality, simplicity, self-discipline, and economy. …