Old and New New Englanders
Immigration and Regional Identity in the Gilded Age
Publication Year: 2014
Published by: University of Michigan Press
Cover
Acknowledgments
It’s a great pleasure to be able to express my gratitude to all the fine folks who have helped me in so many ways over the years I have worked on this book. I will always cherish the memory of your gifts—whether they took the form of a promising research tip or a timely word of encouragement. First, thanks to Tom Dwyer, Andrea Olson, and Christopher Dreyer at the University of...
Introduction: Regional Identity in an Age of Immigration
Of all the social categories that have shaped the lives of Americans, regional identity is surely one of the most complex and poorly understood. Though seemingly transparent at first glance—most of us can probably conjure up a mental image of a southerner or a midwesterner—regional identity proves...
One. World Conquerors or a Dying People? : Racial Theory, Regional Anxiety, and the Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists
Although he was best known in his time as a politician and popular historian, Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge also occasionally weighed in on cultural matters, particularly when they touched on his abiding concerns of race, nation, and New England history. In an essay from the 1890s titled...
Two. New Ireland, New France, New England: The Place of Immigrants in American Regionalism
Most scholars of American regionalism have treated it as the exclusive province of the native born, assuming that only those born in this country could have a particular identification with, or interest in, one of its regions. Many of those scholars contend that regionalism is not merely native born, but...
Three. New England Delicacy: Immigration and the Regional Body
If asked to name the one word that best described New England women, a Gilded Age commentator might well choose delicate. A profoundly ambiguous term that spoke on multiple registers, it evoked a long history of debates about the health, beauty, morality, and reproductive practices of...
Four. “Rural New England Is in a State of Transition”: Immigrants and Yankees on the Land
In the period after the Civil War, rural New England was notorious as a place that had seen better days. While some diehards strenuously denied that there was anything wrong with the region’s countryside, most commentators, both inside and outside New England, believed otherwise. The author...
Five. The New New England: Yankees and Immigrants in the Old Northwest
For many inhabitants of the Old Northwest, the Gilded Age was a time to reflect on their region’s history. They founded state and local pioneer and historical societies to collect the memories of settlers. They subscribed to the Magazine of Western History, the Cleveland-based monthly that focused...
Coda: “The Pilgrims Were Illegal Aliens”
If Julian West, the Brahmin time traveler of Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), had awakened not in the utopia of Edward Bellamy’s novel but in the real Boston of today, he would doubtless be surprised by a number of things. He would certainly be impressed by the physical transformation of...
E-ISBN-13: 9780472029990
E-ISBN-10: 0472029991
Print-ISBN-13: 9780472052080
Page Count: 280
Publication Year: 2014
OCLC Number: 879352513
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Old and New New Englanders
