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

Conforti, Joseph A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807849375 ISBN 13: 9780807849378

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Synopsis

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 this title

Book Description:

"[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

From the Inside Flap:

From the days of the Pilgrims to the post-World War II era, Conforti traces how New England's unique regional heritage was created, reshaped, and culturally transmitted through material artifacts, literature, history, ritual, and institutions.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0807849375
• ISBN 13: 9780807849378
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400