The University of North Carolina Press

Approx. 400 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 40 illus., notes, index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-2625-6

Published: October 2001

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-4937-8

Published: October 2001

Imagining New England

Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century

By Joseph A. Conforti

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Awards & Distinctions

Winner of the 2002 Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Book Award

Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: 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.

About the Author

Joseph A. Conforti is professor of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. His previous books include Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture.

Reviews

"[This book is] fun to read. It is also substantive, well-organized and challenging. . . . Conforti leads the reader on a tour of New England culture seen from within and without."
--Maine Sunday Telegram

"[A] provocative study."
--Boston Globe

"[Earns] a place among the more thought-provoking revisionist works."
--Choice

"An important book on historical misconception and mythmaking."
--American Historical Review

"Engagingly written. . . . Conforti draws on a wide range of evidence, elite and popular, visual and textual, providing fresh perspectives on such old chestnuts as the Puritan jeremiad along with analyses of such overlooked sources as 'Pilgrim' statuary. . . . Subtle and satisfying."
--Journal of American History

"Joseph Conforti has written the essential book about the history of the New England of our imagination--a region configured around Puritans, Yankees, and their literal and symbolic descendants. In a broad-ranging series of familiar (and unfamiliar) examples that range from Puritan jeremiads to Yankee magazine, Conforti deftly shows that the centuries-old idealization of New England has been the other side of an equally venerable tradition of worry about its decline. Above all, Conforti reveals how the New England of our imagination has long depended on the exclusion of ethnic outsiders from the region's essential identity, and his attention is never far from those other New Englanders. In this book Joseph Conforti has done what nobody else has ever attempted. A major achievement."
--Stephen Nissenbaum, University of Massachusetts