New England

Encyclopedia : N : NE : NEW : New England

**New England**
Political history
Documented flags of colonial New England. Based on the English Red Ensign, variations existed with and without pine trees and St George's cross.http://www.midcoast.com/~martucci/flags/NEFlag.html

Chartering as Plymouth Council for New England	1620
Formation as United Colonies of New England	1643
Formation as Dominion of New England	1686
Admission to U.S. - Connecticut - Maine - Massachusetts - New Hampshire - Rhode Island - Vermont	- January 9, 1788 (5th) - March 15, 1820 (23rd) - February 6, 1788 (6th) - June 21, 1788 (9th) - May 29, 1790 (13th) - March 4, 1791 (14th)
Regional statistics
Largest city	Boston
U.S. States	Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont
Area - Total	181,440 km²
Population - Total (2006) - Density	13,922,517 76.7 people/km²

This article is about the region in the United States of America. For other uses of this name, see New England (disambiguation).

The New England region of the United States is located in the northeastern corner of the country, and a part of the cross-border Atlantic Northeast region. It includes the states Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The region's most populous city, and historically its business and cultural center, is Boston. During the 20th century, urban expansion has made the New York metropolitan area an important economic influence on southwestern Connecticut.

New England is the oldest clearly-defined region of the United States, unique among U.S. geographic regions in that it is also a former political entity. Originally inhabited by indigenous peoples, English settlers, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, arrived nearly four centuries ago at the beginning of the 17th century. It was one of the first regions of the original North American British colonies to demonstrate ambitions of independence from the Crown in the 18th century, although it would later collectively oppose the War of 1812 with Great Britain. In the 19th century, it played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, became a source of some of the first examples of American literature and philosophy, and showed the first signs of the effects of the Industrial Revolution in North America."New England," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2006 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Together, the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions are generally referred to as the Northeastern region of the United States.

Contents

History

The indigenous peoples of New England

New England has long been inhabited by Algonquian-speaking native peoples, including the Abenaki, the Penobscot, the Wampanoag, and many others. During the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans such as Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques Cartier and John Cabot (known as Giovanni Caboto before being based in England) charted the New England coast. They referred to the region as Norumbega, named for a fabulous native city that was supposed to exist there.

Early European settlement (1615-1620)

For the early history of the Connecticut Colony, see New Netherland.

On April 10, 1606, King James I of England chartered the Virginia Companies of London and Plymouth. The latter included land extending as far as present-day northern Maine.http://www.learner.org/channel/workshops/primarysources/virginia/transcript01.html The purpose of both was to claim land for England and trade."In addition to claiming land for England and bringing the faith of the Church of England to the native peoples, the Virginia Company was also enjoined both by the crown and its members to make a tidy profit by whatever means it found expedient." http://www.nps.gov/colo/Jthanout/TobaccoHistory.html The Dutch New Netherland Company established the beginnings of New Netherland in 1615, when they established trading posts on the Hudson River, near present-day Albany, New York."On October 11, 1614 merchants from the cities of Amsterdam and Hoorn formed The New Netherland Company receiving a three year monopoly for fur trading in the newly discovered region from the States General of the United Provinces. In 1615 the company erected Fort Orange on Castle Island near Albany and began trading with the Indians for furs." http://www.coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinIntros/NNHistory.html

The region was named "New England" by Captain John Smith, who explored its shores in 1614.New England. (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 20, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9055457

Plymouth Council for New England (1620-1643)

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 colonize and govern the region."...joint stock company organized in 1620 by a charter from the British crown with authority to colonize and govern the area now known as New England." New England, Council for. (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved July 13, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9055458 On March 3, 1636, the Connecticut Colony was granted a charter and established its own government. Vermont was then unsettled, and the territories of New Hampshire and Maine were then governed by Massachusetts. The oldest colony, Plymouth, would eventually be absorbed by Massachusetts, and New Haven would be absorbed by Connecticut.

The New England Confederation (1643-1686)

Six years after the Pequot War of 1637, 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 a possible war 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 organization was composed of two delegates from each of the four member colonies. Six of the eight votes were necessary to adopt any measure. Regular annual meetings were to be held, but additional ones could be called as necessary. Each member colony retained its own governing institutions.http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h545.html King Philip's War (1675-1676), the bloodiest colonial Indian war of the early colonial period, had a devastating effect on the colonies of southern New England and Rhode Island, but effectively limited the power and influence of the Native Americans in the region that sided with the insurgents. The strains brought on by this war led to the Confederation's decreasing influence in the region.

King Charles II was restored to power in 1661 after the execution of his father Charles I in the English Civil War. On March 12, 1663 he ignored conflicting claims and arbitrarily granted to his brother, the Duke of York and the future king James II, a charter for an enormous swath of territory in North America. This charter covered all the land between the Connecticut River and the Delaware River, Long Island; Martha's Vinyard; Nantucket; and the area between the Kennebec River and the St. Croix River, extending inland from the Atlantic coast to the St. Lawrence River. This grant not only directly confiscated the Dutch colony in New York, but also included a large part of settled land in Long Island, Connecticut and most of present day Maine, (then administered by Massachusetts) and part of Quebec.

The Dominion of New England (1686-1689)

In 1686, King James II, concerned about the increasingly independent ways of the colonies, in particular their self governing Charters, open flouting of the Navigation Acts and their increasing military power decreed the Dominion of New England, an administrative union comprising all the New England colonies. Two years later, the provinces of New York (New Amsterdam) and the New Jersey, which had been confiscated by force from the Dutch, were added. The union, imposed from the outside, and removed nearly all their popularly elected leaders, was highly unpopular among the colonists. In 1687, when the Connecticut Colony refused to follow a decision of the dominion governor Edmund Andros to turn over their charter, he sent an armed contingent to seize the colony's charter. The colonists, according to popular legend, hid the charter inside the Charter Oak tree. Andros' efforts to loot the colonies, replace their leaders and to unify the colonial defenses under his control met little success and the dominion ceased after only three years. After the very popular removal of King James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Andros was arrested and sent back to England by the colonists.http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h546.html

Modern New England (1689-present)

The Old World's enduring influence over New England is evident in the architecture of Boston College, originally dubbed Oxford in America

After the Glorious Revolution in 1689 the charters of most of the colonies were significantly modified with the appointment of Royal Governors to nearly each colony. An uneasy tension existed between the Royal Governors, their officers and the elected governing bodies in the colonies. The governors wanted essentially unlimited arbitrary powers and the different layers of locally elected officials resisted as best they could. In most cases the local town governments continued operating as self-governing bodies as they had before the Royal Governors showed up and to the extent possible ignored the Royal Governors. This tension eventually led to the American Revolution when the states formed their own governments. The colonies were not formally united again until 1776 as newly formed states, when they declared themselves independent states in a larger (but not yet federalist) union called the United States.

The New England States were originally settled between 1620 and 1640 by about 30,000 settlers and received little immigration until the Irish showed up in the 1840s. The almost one million inhabitants 130 years later at the time of the Revolution were nearly all descended from the original settlers, whose 3 percent annual natural growth rate caused a doubling of population every 25 years. Their beliefs and ancestry were nearly all shared and made them into what was probably the largest more-or-less homogeneous group of settlers in America. Their continued high birth rate continued for at least a century more, making the descendants of these New Englanders well represented in nearly all states today. In the 18th century and the early 19th century, New England was still considered to be a very distinct region of the 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.

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 sites. Its name is a reminder of the past, as many of the original English-Americans have migrated further west.

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 New England, and especially Massachusetts, is marked by religious intolerance and harsh laws.

Town meetings

A derivative of meetings held by church elders, town meetings were and are an integral part of governance in towns across New England. 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.

New England and political thought

Samuel Adams embodied the revolutionary spirit that, in many ways, is still alive and well in New England today.

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. 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 libertarianism, and has been adopted by the anarchist tradition. A modern example of this spirit is the Free State Project in New Hampshire.

While modern New England known for its liberal tendencies, Puritan New England was highly intolerant of any deviation from strict social norms. During the civil rights era, Boston brewed with racial tension over school busing to end de facto segregation of its public schools.

Contemporary politics

Today, the dominant party in New England is the Democratic Party, though most states have a significant Republican electorate, especially New Hampshire and Maine which are both represented in the U.S. Senate by two Republicans. As of the 2004 state elections, Maine is the only state that has its executive and legislative branches controlled by the same party (the Democrats). 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.

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 no death row inmates and has not held an execution since 1939. Connecticut held an execution in 2005, the first in New England in forty-five years.

Vermont was the first state to allow civil unions between same sex couples, and Massachusetts was the first state to allow same-sex marriage between same sex couples. In 2005, Connecticut also began to allow civil unions.

As of 2006, Massachusetts is the only state with a plan to adopt a system of universal health care for its citizens.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401937.html

Education

Higher education

New England is home to four of the eight Ivy League universities. Pictured here is Dartmouth Hall on the campus of Dartmouth College.

New England contains some of the oldest and most renowned institutions of higher learning in the United States. The first such institution, Harvard, was founded at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636. According to US News and World Report, 8 of the nation's top-50 universities and 13 of its top-50 liberal arts colleges are located in New England. These include four out of the eight universities in the Ivy League (Harvard University, Yale University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College), Tufts University, Boston College, Colby College, Bates College, Bowdoin College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Middlebury College, Williams College, Amherst College, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, and others. A number of the graduates settle in the region after school, providing the area with a well-educated population and one of its most valuable resources.

Culture and education

New England has numerous world-class universities, as well as many prestigious undergraduate colleges. Boston alone has over 30 colleges and universities, plus more in the suburbs. As a result, the region is a world leader in science, engineering, medicine, law, business research, humanities and social sciences, as well as in libraries and research centers. The higher learning sector is a major factor in the region's economy, attracting students, scholars, researchers and grants from around the world. Closely related are the many orchestras, art institutes, art schools, music schools and museums that make the region the cultural center of the nation.

At the pre-college level, New England is home to a majority of the most prominent American independent schools (also known as private schools), such as Deerfield Academy, Milton Academy, Noble and Greenough School, and Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, St. Paul's School and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and Canterbury School, Choate Rosemary Hall, Hotchkiss School, and Loomis Chaffee in Connecticut, and the schools of the Independent School League. The concept of the elite "New England prep school" and the "preppy" lifestyle is an iconic part of the region's image.

The public K-12 school systems, usually locally funded, are also well regarded. A recent government-funded survey of the 50 states ranked Connecticut as number one in public education. The renowned Boston Latin School is the oldest public high school in America.

Academic publishing

New England is home to several prominent academic journals and publishing companies, including, but not limited to, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard University Press, and Yale University Press. It is also home to many institutions leading the open access alternative to conventional academic publication, including MIT, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Maine.

Population

In 1910, 6,552,681 people lived in New England. Today, the total population of New England is 13,922,517. If New England were one state, the population would rank 5th in the nation, behind Florida. The total area in this scenario (181,440 sq km) would rank 20th behind North Dakota.

Regional population layout

Southern New England

The bulk of the region's population is concentrated in southern New England, which comprises Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The most populous state is Massachusetts, with the population centered mostly around its political and cultural capital, Boston. Western Massachusetts is less densely populated than eastern Massachusetts. The resulting effect is a cultural divide between urban New Englanders and rural New Englanders living in Western Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Connecticut is more of a cultural paradox compared to the other states in the region. The southwestern part of the state (which contains about 1/2 the state's population and can roughly be drawn as everything south and west of an imaginary line from just north of Danbury to New Haven) is essentially a suburb of or a part of the New York metropolitan area. This area has grown rapidly in population since 1970, as many corporations formerly headquartered in Manhattan moved to nearby Fairfield County to take advantage of lower taxes while still staying within the general region, bringing jobs and "New York transplants." Therefore, culturally, this region of the state is more like that of neighboring New York City than the rest of the New England region. The remainder of the state (and other half of its population) is very similar culturally to that of the neighboring states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The wealth in western Connecticut, the Hartford and New Haven suburbs and the shoreline all contribute to the state having the state's highest per capita income of any in the United States.

An example of this cultural dichotomy can be found in residents' allegiance to sports teams. Western Connecticut residents may root for either Boston or New York teams, unlike other New England residents who tend to be staunchly loyal to Boston teams. Television broadcasts in Hartford and New Haven typically give equal coverage to sports teams in both Boston and New York.

Coastal New England

The coastline is more urban than western New England, which is typically rural, even in urban states like Massachusetts. These characteristics of the region's population are due mainly to historical factors; the original colonists settled mostly on the coastline of Massachusetts Bay. The only state without access to the Atlantic Ocean, Vermont, is also the least-populated. After nearly 400 years, the region still maintains, for the most part, its historical population layout.

New England's coast is dotted with urban centers, such as Portland, Portsmouth, Boston, New Bedford, Fall River, Providence, New Haven, and Bridgeport, as well as smaller cities, like Newburyport, Gloucester, Biddeford, Bath, and New London. The smaller fishing towns, like Gloucester, are popular tourist attractions, as they tend to retain their historical character, and often have colorful pasts.

Cape Cod, also a popular tourist attraction, is lined with sandy beaches and dotted with bed and breakfast tourist lodgings. The picturesque and rugged coast of Maine is best known for its beauty and for lobster. New Hampshire, which has the smallest coastline of all of the coastal New England states, is home to Hampton Beach, also frequented by visitors to the region.

Urban New England

Boston is considered to be the cultural and historical capital of New England. Above is an aerial photo of Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, with Cambridge on the northern bank of the Charles River.

Providence is the second-largest city in New England and claims the largest contiguous area of National Historic Society-designated buildings in the U.S.

Three of the four most densely populated states in the United States are in New England. In order, the four most densely populated states are: New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Indeed, southern New England forms an integral part of the BosWash megalopolis, a conglomeration of urban centers that spans from Boston to Washington, D.C.

The Greater Boston metropolitan area has a total population of approximately 5.8 million. Within this region are the following cities in decreasing order of population size:

The largest cities by population in New England are:

Regional nomenclature

A person from New England is known as a New Englander. Sometimes, New Englanders may also be referred to as Yankees, although this term has grown to refer to the people of the greater region of the northeastern United States, and sometimes of the entire United States.

Culture

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.

As the oldest of the 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.

The often-parodied dialect of the region (see Mayor Quimby of The Simpsons or Peter Griffin of Family Guy) is most commonly known as the Boston accent or Boston English, although, in reality, this accent is reserved mostly for the coasts of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine. It is the result of an incomplete transition from 17th century British English, which the standard American dialect imitates, and modern British English. There are also other regional accents as well, such as the Boston Brahmin accent, said to be typical of the Boston Brahmin aristocracy.

Media

New England has several regional broadcasting companies, including New England Cable News (NECN) and the New England Sports Network (NESN). The former 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.[link]

The New England Sports Network covers New England sports teams throughout the region, save for Fairfield County, Connecticut.[link]

Sites of interest

Boats on the Kennebunk River between Kennebunk and Kennebunkport.

Some obvious sites of interest in New England are historical cities like Boston, Providence, Hartford, Portsmouth, Newburyport, Plymouth, and Gloucester.

New Haven, Connecticut is home to Yale University. In eastern Massachusetts, one can visit the sandy beaches of Cape Cod, including the port of Provincetown, known for its vibrant gay community. The islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are popular summer tourist locations. In the west, one can camp and hike in the hills and forests of the Berkshire Mountains. The White Mountains of New Hampshire are popular ski destinations, and provide opportunities for camping and hiking. Hanover, New Hampshire is home to Dartmouth College. The Green Mountains of Vermont are also popular ski destinations, and provide stunning displays of fall foliage. Vermont is also known for its maple syrup farms, and is the home of Ben & Jerry's. The seaports of Maine are sources of excellent seafood, especially lobster. York, Maine and Kennebunkport, Maine are popular summer destinations. Rhode Island offers the illustrious Newport mansions of its former aristocracy.

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, and the Pixies, of Boston, influenced the grunge movement of the 1990s. Dropkick Murphys, from South Boston, mix hardcore and punk music with Irish music in a style known as Celtic Punk.

In much of rural New England, particularly Maine, Acadian and Quebecois culture also dominate the region's music and dance. "Contra Dancing" is a popular and common community activity similar to square-dancing that is usually backed by Irish, Acadian, or other folk music.

Knitting, quilting and rug hooking circles are also a common activity in much of rural New England, as well as the more typical activities of church, sports, and town government.

Literature

Edgar Allen Poe, American poet, was a native of New England.

New England has been the birthplace of many American authors and poets. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Concord, Massachusetts. Edgar Allen Poe hailed from Boston. Emily Dickinson was born in and lived her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau was also born in Concord, 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. John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. Robert Lowell, Confessionalist poet and teacher of Sylvia Plath, was also a New England native. Plath hailed from Boston. Anne Sexton, also taught by Lowell, was born and died in Massachusetts. Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine. Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, was also born in Exeter.

The region has also drawn the attention of authors and poets hailing from other parts of the United States. 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, who was born in California, is almost always associated with New England; he moved to Massachusetts during his teen years and published his first poem in Lawrence. Arthur Miller, a New York City native, used New England as the setting for some of his works, most notably The Crucible.

Largely on the strength of local writers like Thoreau, Boston, Massachusetts 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, among others, as well as (until recently) literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly.

New England is also the setting for most of the gothic horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, most probably because he 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.

More recently, Stephen King has also used the small towns of the New England state of Maine as the setting for much of his horror fiction, with much of the action taking place in or near the fictional town of Castle Rock.

Modern author 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.

The novel Ethan Frome was written in 1911 by Edith Wharton. It 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.

Economy

In the twentieth century, most of New England's traditional industries have relocated to states or foreign countries where goods can be made more cheaply. In more than a few factory towns, skilled workers have been left without jobs. Largely around Boston in the ring of Route 128, the gap has been partly filled by high technology industries, in particular software and biotech. Education, high technology, financial services, tourism, and medicine, continue to drive the local economy.

In the southwestern Connecticut counties of Fairfield and New Haven the economy is more closely associated with New York City, and the economy is more often viewed as an extension of the New York Metropolitan Area. For years many residents of southwestern Connecticut have crossed the state line each day to work in Manhattan. More recently, New Yorkers have begun to travel into Connecticut as part of a reverse commute to many of the job centers developed in the suburbs.

In rural New England the economy still revolves around fishing, farming and forestry, as well as small hometown businesses that serve the rural populations. Much of the landscape of New England is comprised of small, family farms: typically dairy, fiber, and diversified market vegetable farms which are sold at the many small farmers markets throughout the region. There is a growing movement toward organic farming, particularly in Vermont and Maine.

Forestry is primarily a large-scale operation in the northernmost regions of New England. Nearly 25% of the land mass of Maine is privately held by paper companies. Logging this land and processing the timber are an important piece of this regions economy, with many paper mills along major rivers in the region.

In coastal New England, fishing comes primarily in the form of lobstering, with groundfishing, and shellfish digging also being important contributors to the fishing economy. Aquaculture is a growing industry. Herring seining (baitfish for lobstering) is also important.

The GDP of New England is approximately $649 billion; per capita it is $45,786.

Notable New Englanders

Major Professional Sports Teams

Informal polling, along with a general consensus among the sports media, indicates that baseball is the most-watched sport in New England, with the Boston Red Sox being the region's most popular sports franchise and the region's focal point of conversation throughout the summer. Even Red Sox players have noted the feeling of affection and ownership the entire New England region has towards the team. Nearly every major town in the region carries the Red Sox through the town radio station. The 2004 World Series victory by the Red Sox, the first since 1918, inspired widespread euphoria throughout the region, and three million people attended the team's victory parade in Boston. The recent success of the New England Patriots, a team that has won three of the past five Super Bowls, has sparked a renewed interest in football.

It should be noted that in the parts of southwestern Connecticut that are close to New York City, there are an abundance of New York Yankees and New York Mets fans, who are often self-identified as suburban New Yorkers. Prior to the establishment of the Patriots football team in 1960, the New York Giants received significant support from New England. Additionally, until the team relocated to Washington for the start of the 2005 season, the Montreal Expos received some fan support in northern New England.

Up until 13 April 1997, Hartford also had its own major hockey team, the Hartford Whalers. Originally known as the New England Whalers, they changed their name to the Hartford Whalers in 1979 after leaving the WHA for the NHL, hoping to carve a niche market in Hartford.

In 1997 the Whalers left Hartford for Raleigh, North Carolina (amid much controversy), where they became the Hurricanes.

In 1999, the New England Patriots also flirted with the idea of moving to Hartford, in exchange for what three NFL franchise owners called "the greatest financial deal any NFL owner has ever received". The package, announced by then Connecticut Governor John Rowland, included, according to the Boston Globe: total costs of building a new stadium, training facility and highways; $175 million to owner Robert Kraft if he failed to sell out premium seats as well as $200 million or more over 30 years for stadium improvements and renovations. The state further offered to waive property taxes on the stadium and adjacent hotel and entertainment pavilion, which Kraft would have built.

The deal fell through after Massachusetts offered a far less generous offer of $70 million for infrastructure work. Many in Connecticut felt this was a deliberate ploy on the part of Mr. Kraft, a ruse to find public funds in Massachusetts, enabling the Patriots to remain in Foxboro. Below is a list of the major professional sports teams in New England:

Baseball: Boston Red Sox
Football: New England Patriots
Basketball: Boston Celtics; Connecticut Sun
Hockey: Boston Bruins
Soccer: New England Revolution
Lacrosse: Boston Cannons

References

[Adams, James Truslow. The Founding of New England (1921)]
Adams, James Truslow. Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776 (1923)
Adams, James Truslow. New England in the Republic, 1776-1850 (1926)
Andrews, Charles M. The Fathers of New England: A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths (1919), short survey.
Axtell, James, ed. The American People in Colonial New England (1973), new social history
[Black, John D. The rural economy of New England: a regional study (1950]
Brewer, Daniel Chauncey. ''Conquest of New England by the Immigrant (1926).
Conforti, Joseph A. Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (2001)
Dwight, Timothy. Travels Through New England and New York (circa 1800) 4 vol. (1969) Online at: [vol 1]; [vol 2]; [vol 3]; [vol 4]
Hall, Donald, foreword, Feintuch, Burt and Watters, David H., editors, Encyclopedia of New England (2005)
Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1998)
[Lilly, Lamberth. History of New England (1847)]
Lockridge, Kenneth A. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (1985), new social history
[McPhetres, S. A. A political manual for the campaign of 1868, for use in the New England states, containing the population and latest election returns of every town (1868)]
[Palfrey, John Gorham. History of New England (5 vol 1859-90)]
Zimmerman, Joseph F. The New England Town Meeting: Democracy in Action (1999)
NEW YORK: Atlas of Historical County Boundaries; John H. Long, Editor; Compiled by Kathryn Ford Thorne; A Project of the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History; The new Berry Library; Simon & Schuster; 1993.
Contributors: U.S. Census Bureau. ["Census Regions and Divisions of the United States"] (PDF). Retrieved May 11, 2005
The Washington Post, [Mass. Bill Requires Health Coverage]

Notes

External links

[Historic Descriptions of New England Cities and Towns]
[Historic USGS Maps of New England & NY]
[New England Articles of Confederation]
[Charter of New England]
[Discover New England]
[New England Governors Conference]
[Flag of New England]
[Boston.com]
[NewEngland.com]
[New England Pride]
[David's Foliage Report]
[A Very Grave Matter] New England old gravestones and history

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