Yankeedom

New England and the belt it settled westward, founded by people who thought a society could be designed. Puritans arrived from 1630 in family groups rather than as young male labourers, intending a godly commonwealth that would be watched and copied, and they built the institutions that follow from that: town meetings, compulsory schooling from 1647, Harvard in 1636, and a congregational church in which each congregation governed itself. The result was an unusually literate, unusually self-governing society with a strong conviction that public institutions could improve people - and a matching intolerance, since dissenters were expelled and four Quakers hanged. That combination travelled west with New England migration through upstate New York, the northern Midwest and into the upper Great Lakes, carrying town government, free public schooling and state universities with it. Abolitionism, the temperance movement, the first women's rights conventions and much of the common school movement began in this belt. Its politics have favoured public spending and regulation more consistently than any other American region for two centuries. Irish, Italian and later immigration remade its cities without displacing the institutional pattern. Boston remains its capital in practice. The region covers New England, upstate New York, the northern Midwest and parts of the upper Great Lakes. It has the highest concentration of colleges and universities in the country. Town meeting government survives in much of rural New England. Public library provision began here. The region's dialect boundaries still track the original settlement lines. Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine were settled largely from within it.

• Existed: 1620 CE – present
• Type: Entity