| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joseph A. Conforti. Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 384. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

This aptly titled book focuses on the creation of a partially false regional myth that shifted culturally and geographically over time to perpetuate a counterfeit intellectual image of New England. Joseph A. Conforti studies the image makers who molded regional identity according to their own views, so that New England became "America's first strongly imagined region" (p. 6). 1

Cultural myths about New England began early, with succeeding generations of Puritans. The new republic cast a people representative of common Puritan values and platitudes. The sacrificing Minute Man became the virtuous independent Yankee who personified the region and the nation, allowing New England Federalists to dominate the Union. A crass commercialization that eclipsed rural life beginning in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts and Connecticut endangered this nascent cultural identity. "Aggrieved" regionalists reacted by inventing a colonial past that was in harmony with a new nationalism. To counter a predatory capitalism, the cultural regionalists bathed New England in a rosy light in which colonial forebears supposedly shared communal verities and individualism bowed to the needs of the commonweal. Ignoring the reality and commonality of the denucleated and isolated rural hamlets of the past two hundred years, they created the "white village," or perfect New England town that symbolized a harmonious social order. . . .

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