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 the 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 puritan pilgrims from England first settled in the region in 1620, forming the Plymouth Colony, the first successful English settlement in the Americas. Ten years later, more Puritans settled north of Plymouth Colony in the greater Boston area, thus forming the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
You can take a virtual tour of the Mayflower ship, the first ship of the pilgrim in the video below. We take you inside the ship to show you how the early English immigrants lived, worked, slept, cooked and ate for months on a torturous and oftentimes dangerous ship journey.
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 the 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. These 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 the spring of 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.
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.
The region is particularly known for its beautiful fall foliage. Take a look at the beautiful New England scenery in the video below.
Each state is principally subdivided into small incorporated municipalities, which are known as towns. These are often governed by town meetings. The only unincorporated areas in the region exist in the sparsely populated northern regions of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
It maintains a strong sense of cultural identity, although the terms of this identity are often contrasted, combining Puritanism with liberalism, agrarian life with industry, and isolation with immigration.