Imagining New England

“[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

“[A] provocative study.” — Boston Globe

“[Earns] a place among the more thought-provoking revisionist works.” — CHOICE

“An important book on historical misconception and mythmaking.” — American Historical Review

“Engagingly written. . . . Conforti draws on a wide range of evidence, elite and popular, visual and textual, providing fresh perspectives on such old chestnuts as the Puritan jeremiad along with analyses of such overlooked sources as 'Pilgrim' statuary. . . . Subtle and satisfying.” — Journal of American History

“Joseph Conforti has written the essential book about the history of the New England of our imagination — a region configured around Puritans, Yankees, and their literal and symbolic descendants. In a broad-ranging series of familiar (and unfamiliar) examples that range from Puritan jeremiads to Yankee magazine, Conforti deftly shows that the centuries-old idealization of New England has been the other side of an equally venerable tradition of worry about its decline. Above all, Conforti reveals how the New England of our imagination has long depended on the exclusion of ethnic outsiders from the region’s essential identity, and his attention is never far from those other New Englanders. In this book Joseph Conforti has done what nobody else has ever attempted. A major achievement.” — Stephen Nissenbaum, University of Massachusetts

“Joseph Conforti’s new book is a sweeping and sure-footed analysis of the New England regional identity. No other work about an American region so skillfully reflects our current understanding of what is significant about regional identities. Conforti’s thoughtful book provides a historically grounded narrative that gives full play to the contested struggle over regional identities. Conforti shows all of us in regional studies how to reconceptualize our work on particular places.” — Charles Reagan Wilson, Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi