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

by Joseph A. Conforti

Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination.

This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

Genres: History

400 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2001

Reviews

[Martin Rundkvist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I wanted to understand more about the region where I spent two childhood years (in Greenwich, Conn.), and about the background to H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. I was not disappointed: there's lots of interesting material here. But for the first 250 years of his timeline up to 1880, Conforti's writing is awfully verbose and repetitive. This book could preferably have been half as long, without losing any important content.

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful examination of New England regional cultural identity from new England, through Americaniation, and re-Anglication, early nationalism through mapping, Yankee identity in the Antebellum era, Colonial revival reform, and the rise of "Yankee" magazine during the depression. Conforti discusses the intersections between Puritainism, literature, industrialism, immigration, and social reform to shaping understandings of geographic place and regional cultural identity.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Should be read along with David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed" and Joseph Wood's "The New England Village."