New England

New England (in English, New England) is a region of the United States, located on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in the northeast of the country, with its own cultural identity that has its origins in the Puritans and other British settlers who settled the area from 1607. It is made up of six states: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. It has 15.1 million inhabitants and the most populous city is Boston.

It is the place where the first British colonists settled, called the Pilgrim Fathers, who arrived in North America after the landing of the Mayflower ship in 1620. They defended free public education for children and worked to achieve literacy universal. In the 19th century, it played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and was an early focus of the Industrial Revolution.

Today, New England is home to some of the world's leading academic institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Brown Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), among many other public and private universities. The main sectors are technology, medicine, finance and tourism. New England is mostly made up of small townships and cities, often using a popular assembly for self-government, and has a high level of political participation.

The region maintains a strong sense of cultural identity that distinguishes it from the rest of the country, although the content of this identity is often contrasting, combining puritanism with liberalism, agrarian life with industry, and isolation with immigration. New England is the only region of the country that has a historical, rather than a geographical name, recognized as such by the federal government.

History

Indigenous tribes

The first known inhabitants of New England were Algonquian American Indians who spoke a variety of Eastern Algonquian languages. These tribes included the Abenaki, Micmac, Penobscot, Pequot, Mohegan, Narragansett, Pocumtuck, and Wampanoag. Before the arrival of European settlers, the western Abenakis inhabited New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, as well as parts of Quebec and western Maine. The main tribe was the Norridgewock, which inhabited present-day Maine.

The Penobscots lived along the Penobscot River in Maine. The Narragansetts and the tribes under their sovereignty lived in most of present-day Rhode Island, west of Narragansett Bay, including Block Island. The Wampanoags occupied southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. The Pocumtucks lived in western Massachusetts, and the Mohegan and Pequot tribes lived in the Connecticut region.

As early as 1600, French, Dutch, and English traders began exploring the New World, trading metal, glass, and cloth for local beaver pelts among other goods.

Colonial Period

Virginia Company

On April 10, 1606, King James I of England issued a charter to the Virginia Company, comprising the London Company and the Plymouth Company. These two privately funded companies intended to claim land for England, transact business, and make a profit. In 1620, the Mayflower Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts, beginning the story of permanent European settlement in New England.

Geography

Map of New England in 1725.

Political and geographical map of the New England region.

New England is a physiographic province within the Appalachian Highlands region, including the Seaboard Lowland, New England Upland, White Mountains, Green Mountains, and Taconic Mountains sections.

The New England hills are long; the mountains and coasts are jagged and glacially shaped as a result of the retreat of the ice caps approximately 18,000 years ago, during the last glacial period. Stretching from southwestern Connecticut to northeastern Maine, the region's coastline is dotted with lakes, mountains, marshes, and sandy beaches. Inland are the Appalachian Mountains, which stretch through the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. In this range are the White Mountains (NH), which are home to Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeastern United States. It is the place with the maximum wind speed recorded on Earth.

The longest river is the Connecticut River, which flows from northeastern New Hampshire for 400 miles and empties into Long Island Sound, virtually bisecting the region. Lake Champlain, located between the states of New York and Vermont, is the largest lake in the region, followed by Lake Moosehead in Maine and Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

Climate

Weather patterns vary throughout the region. Most of the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have a humid continental climate with short, mild summers and cold winters. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, southern NH and VT, and coastal Maine have a humid continental climate with long, warm summers and cold winters. Due to the thick deciduous forests, autumn in New England offers bright colors and showy leaves, and comes earlier than in other regions, attracting tourism called "leaf peepers". Springs are generally wet and cloudy. Average precipitation is generally between 1,000 and 1,500 mm per year, although northern Vermont and Maine see slightly less, at 500 to 1,000 mm. Snowfall can often exceed 2,500mm per year. As a result, the mountains and ski resorts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont are popular winter destinations.

The lowest temperature recorded in New England was -45.5 °C in Bloomfield, Vermont, on December 30, 1933. This was also recorded in the Big Black River, Maine, in 2009.

Languages

According to the "American Community Survey" As of 2010, 83.46% of the New England population over the age of 5 say they speak English at home, while 6.35% speak Spanish, 1.82% Portuguese, 1.45% French, 0.68% Chinese, and 0.68 % Italian.

Although there are 400,000 Francophones in New England, many of their descendants speak more English than French, and it is also worth noting that there is a distinctive Boston accent more similar to the British accent spoken 350 years ago.

Population

According to the United States national census conducted on April 1, 2010, the New England region had 14,444,865 inhabitants. According to data collected by the American Community Survey between the years 2006-2008, 48.7% of its population was made up of men and 51.3% were women. Approximately 22.4% of its inhabitants were under 18 years of age, 13.5% were over 65 years of age. New England, which has a fairly moderate population growth (typically "European") - of an annual average of only 0.37% between the censuses of 2000 and 2010 - is home to 4.75% of the population from United States. However, as its standard of living -and therefore its per capita income- is higher than the country's average, it contributes approximately 5.5% of the national GNP.

Aerial view of downtown Boston, considered the cultural and historical capital of New England.

In terms of race and ethnicity, white Americans make up 84.9% of New England's population, of whom 81.2% were of non-Hispanic white origin. Blacks make up 5.7% of the region's population, of which 5.3% were blacks of non-Hispanic origin. Native Americans form only 0.3% of the population, their number amounting to 37,234. There were just over 500,000 Asian and Americans residing in New England at the time of the survey. Asian Americans make up 3.5% of the region's population. The Chinese form 1.1% of the total population of the region, and numbered 158,282. Hindus make up 0.8% of the population, and numbered at 119,140. Japanese descendants are very few; only 14,501 of New England's residents were of Japanese descent, equal to only 0.1% of its population.

Polynesians were even fewer. Only 4,194 people were members of this group, which is equivalent to 0.03% of the population. There were only 138 Samoans residing in the region. Latinos are the largest minority in New England. Latinos of any nationality make up 7.9% of the New England population, and there were more than 1.1 million Latinos in the survey. Puerto Ricans were the most numerous of the Latino subgroups. More than half a million (507,000) live in New England, 3.6% of the population. A little over 100,000 Mexicans make New England their home. Dominicans number more than 70,000.

Cuban-Americans are rare, there were approximately 20,000 Cuban-Americans in the region. People of other Latino ancestry (for example, Bolivians, Colombians, Salvadorans, etc.) make up 3.5% of the New England population, numbering more than 492,000.

The population of European descent in New England is ethnically diverse. The majority of the European-American population is of Irish, Italian, English, French, and German descent. There are smaller, but significant populations such as the Polish, the French-Canadian and the Portuguese.

According to the 2006-2008 survey, the top ten European communities were as follows:

• Irish: 21.1% (More than 3 million inhabitants)
• Italian: 14.4% (More than 2 million)
• English: 13.7% (1.9 million)
• French: 10.4% (1.5 million)
• German: 8.2 per cent (1.2 million)
• Powder: 5.6% (approximately 800,000)
• Franco-Canadian: 4.9% (Approx. 700,000)
• Portuguesa: 3.5% (More than 500,000)
• Scope: 3.1% (More than 40,000)
• Scottish-Irish: 2.1% (More than 290,000)

Main city of the region

Boston, with some 600,000 inhabitants in its strict municipal area (4,660,000 in its metropolitan area and 5.86 million in its conurbation) in mid-2009, is the cultural center ("cultural capital" of the US) and largest industrial area in the area, as well as the oldest large city in the US. The region is populated mostly (about 90%) by Anglo-Saxons of British descent (although there is a notable French-origin minority in Maine and New Hampshire). It stands out politically for its "progressive" political character, similar to Western European social democracy, being therefore a "fief" of the Democratic Party.

Originally, New England consisted only of the established colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, but now, the entire region includes six states, namely:

• Connecticut
• Maine
• Massachusetts
• New Hampshire
• Rhode Island
• Vermont