Theme Week New England

Monday, 20 February 2017 - 12:00 pm (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination:
Category/Kategorie: General, Bon voyage, Theme Weeks
Reading Time:  7 minutes

Massachusetts - Sunset on Cape Cod Bay © flickr.com - PapaDunes/cc-by-sa-2.0

Massachusetts – Sunset on Cape Cod Bay © flickr.com – PapaDunes/cc-by-sa-2.0

New England is a geographical region which comprises six states of the northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and south, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north, respectively. The Atlantic Ocean is to the east and southeast, and Long Island Sound is to the south. The physical geography of New England is diverse for such a small area; southeastern New England is covered by a narrow coastal plain, while the western and northern regions are dominated by the rolling hills and worn-down peaks of the northern end of the Appalachian Mountains. With the Atlantic fall line lying so close to the coast, numerous industrial cities were able to take advantage of water power along the numerous rivers, such as the Connecticut River, which bisects the region from north to south. Indian summer is a period of unseasonably warm, dry weather that sometimes occurs in autumn in New England. The US National Weather Service defines this as weather conditions that are sunny and clear with above normal temperatures, occurring late-September to mid-November.

Puritan Separatist Pilgrims from England first settled in the region in 1620, forming the Plymouth Colony, the second successful English settlement in the Americas, following the Jamestown Settlement in Virgina founded in 1607. Ten years later, more Puritans settled north of Plymouth Colony in Boston, thus forming Massachusetts Bay Colony. Over the next 126 years, people in the region fought in four French and Indian Wars, until the British and their Iroquois allies defeated the French and their Algonquin allies in North America. In 1692, the town of Salem, Massachusetts and surrounding areas experienced one of the most infamous cases of mass hysteria in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the Salem witch trials. In the late 18th century, political leaders from the New England Colonies known as the Sons of Liberty initiated the resistance to Britain’s efforts to impose new taxes without the consent of the colonists. The Boston Tea Party was a protest to which Britain responded with a series of punitive laws stripping Massachusetts of self-government, which were termed the “Intolerable Acts” by the colonists. The confrontation led to the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, and the expulsion of the British authorities from the region in spring 1776. The region played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and was the first region of the U.S. transformed by the Industrial Revolution, centered on the Blackstone and Merrimack river valleys.

Vermont - Burlington - Church Street © flickr.com - Jared and Corin/cc-by-sa-2.0 Vermont - Burke Mountain from Lyndonville © From the nek/cc-by-sa-3.0 Rhode Island - Providence © Loodog Rhode Island - Bristol Harbor © Angusdavis New Hampshire State House in Concord © Jared C. Benedict/cc-by-sa-2.0 Massachusetts - Sunset on Cape Cod Bay © flickr.com - PapaDunes/cc-by-sa-2.0 Massachusetts - Downtown Quincy © flickr.com - Doug Kerr/cc-by-sa-2.0 Massachusetts - Boston Financial District skyline © Nelson48 Maine - Portland Waterfont © Zhengan/cc-by-sa-4.0 Lobster from the Gulf of Maine © flickr.com - Claude Covo-Farchi/cc-by-sa-2.0 Indian Summer in New Hampshire © Someone35/cc-by-sa-3.0 Indian Summer in Connecticut © Yodokalk/cc-by-sa-3.0
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Vermont - Burlington - Church Street © flickr.com - Jared and Corin/cc-by-sa-2.0
Several factors combine to make the New England economy unique. The region is distant from the geographic center of the country, and is a relatively small region, and relatively densely populated. It historically has been an important center of industrial manufacturing and a supplier of natural resource products, such as granite, lobster, and codfish. New England exports food products, ranging from fish to lobster, cranberries, Maine potatoes, and maple syrup. The service industry is important, including tourism, education, financial and insurance services, plus architectural, building, and construction services. The U.S. Department of Commerce has called the New England economy a microcosm for the entire U.S. economy.

New England contains some of the oldest and most renowned institutions of higher learning in the United States and the world. Harvard College was the first such institution, founded in 1636 at Cambridge, Massachusetts to train preachers. Yale University was founded in Saybrook, Connecticut in 1701, and awarded the nation’s first doctoral (PhD) degree in 1861. Yale moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1718, where it has remained to the present day. In addition to four out of eight Ivy League schools, New England contains the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), four of the original Seven Sisters, the bulk of educational institutions that are identified as the “Little Ivies“, one of the eight original Public Ivies.

New England has a shared heritage and culture primarily shaped by waves of immigration from Europe. In contrast to other American regions, many of New England’s earliest Puritan settlers came from eastern England, contributing to New England’s distinctive accents, foods, customs, and social structures. Within modern New England a cultural divide exists between urban New Englanders living along the densely populated coastline, and rural New Englanders in western Massachusetts, northwestern and northeastern Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, where population density is low. Today, New England is the least religious region of the U.S. In 2009, less than half of those polled in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont claimed that religion was an important part of their daily lives.

Many of the first European colonists of New England had a maritime orientation toward whaling (first noted about 1650) and fishing, in addition to farming. New England has developed a distinct cuisine, dialect, architecture, and government. New England cuisine has a reputation 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.

Here you can find the complete Overview of all Theme Weeks.

Read more on VisitNewEngland.com, Wikivoyage New England and Wikipedia New England. Learn more about the use of photos. To inform you about latest news most of the city, town or tourism websites offer a newsletter service and/or operate Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. In addition more and more destinations, tourist organizations and cultural institutions offer Apps for your Smart Phone or Tablet, to provide you with a mobile tourist guide (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.




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