The arrival in 1620 of the Mayflower and Puritan migration occupy the first pages of the history of colonial America. Less known is the exodus from New England, a century and a half later, of their Yankee descendants. Yankees engaged in whaling and the China Trade, and settled in Canada, the American South, and Hawaii. Between 1786 and 1850, some 800,000 Yankees left their exhausted New England farms and villages for New York State, the Northwest Territory and all the way to the West Coast. With missionary zeal the Yankees planted their institutions, culture and values deep into the rich soil of the Western frontier. They built orderly farming communities and towns, complete with church, library, school and university. Yankee values of self-labor, temperance, moral rectitude, respect for the law, democratic town government, and enterprise helped form the American character. New England was the hotbed of reform movements. Yankee-inspired religious movements spread across the nation and beyond. The Anti-Slavery and the Anti-Imperialism movements started in New England. Susan B. Anthony campaigned for women’s suffrage, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross, Dorothea Dix established asylums for the mentally ill, and May Lyon was a pioneer in women’s education. Yankees spread the Industrial Revolution across America, using waterpower and then stream power. Opposing slavery and advocating education for all children, the Yankee pioneers clashed with Southerners moving north. In Kansas the dispute between Yankee and Southerner erupted into armed conflict. In time the Yankee enclaves in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and San Francisco fused with others to form the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite (WASPs), to dominate American commerce, industry, academia and politics. By the close of the nineteenth century, industry began to leave New England. Yankees felt threatened by the rising political power of immigrants. In an effort to keep the nation predominantly white and Protestant, prominent Yankees sought to restrict immigration from Asia, and from eastern and southern Europe, and impose quotas on American-Catholics and Jews seeking admission to elite universities and clubs. Despite barriers, the American-born children of the immigrants benefited from their education in public schools and colleges, entered the American mainstream, and steadily eroded the authority of the Protestant elite. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the United States to immigrants from Asia, Africa and South America. The great mix of races, religions, ethnicity and individual styles is forming a pluralistic America with equally shared rights and opportunities.

How did America become great? How did this country become the most successful, powerful, and prosperous nation in the history of the world? Was it because of the nation's unprecedented founding documents? Was it due to the scores of immigrants from all over the world who brought their dreams and talents to America's shores? Or did America become great, as some contend, through racism, theft, and genocide? Author Troy Tyson proposes a unique argument as to the origins of American greatness: that the country's unparalleled success is a result not of its founding documents, nor its celebrated openness to people of all backgrounds, nor of genocidal tyranny. Rather, The Yankee Way asserts that the nation's great power and success stem primarily from the traits of a comparatively small, peculiar ethnic group from New England known as the Yankees. These traits, which include morality, industriousness, respect for law and order, commitment to education, and dedication to traditional family values, were developed first by the early Puritans of New England, then passed down to their Yankee descendants, who finally embedded them into the cultural DNA of the United States. The Yankee Way explores, in fascinating detail, the history of the Yankees, and the process by which they created modern America and instilled within it their distinct cultural characteristics. Further, though, the book serves as a warning to Americans as to what the future might hold, as the nation rapidly moves away from this critical cultural inheritance, and leaves The Yankee Way behind.

Freedom of speech was restricted during the Revolutionary War. In the great struggle for independence, those who remained loyal to the British crown were persecuted with loss of employment, eviction from their homes, heavy taxation, confiscation of property and imprisonment. Loyalist Americans from all walks of life were branded as traitors and enemies of the people. By the end of the war, 80,000 had fled their homeland to face a dismal exile from which few would return, outcasts of a new republic based on democratic values of liberty, equality and justice.

New England, the most clearly defined region in the United States, includes the six states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. First colonized by the French in 1604 and the British in 1607, the New England colonies were the first to secede from the British Empire and were among the first states admitted to the union. No region has claimed more presidents as native sons (seven) or produced more men and women of exceptional accomplishment and fame. Many Americans see New England as a touchstone for the founding ideas of the nation, and the region served as a source of inspiration for many artists and writers. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of New England contains a chronology, an introduction, appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, places, institutions, and events. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about New England.

"[Historian Allen] recreates in this meticulous and fast-moving posthumous account the events of the pivotal year 1789 in America. It’s a superb distillation of a complex moment in U.S. history.”— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review 1789: George Washington and the Founders Create Americadraws on hundreds of sources to paint a vivid portrait of the new nation, setting out to show the world at large that a new—and very American—form of government was calling itself into being. “No future session of Congress will ever have so arduous and weighty a charge on their hands,” the New York Gazette observed in summer 1789. “No examples to imitate, and no striking historical facts on which to ground their decisions—All is bare creation.” The Constitution had been written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But 1789 was the year the government it described—albeit only in the broadest of terms—had to be brought into being. Veteran journalist Thomas B. Allen brings decades of experience and a gifted storyteller’s eye to the long-hidden history of how George Washington and the Founders set the federal government into motion.

This is the first study to explore the connections between late-19th-century university/college composite class portraits and the field of eugenics – which first took hold in the United States at Harvard University. Eugenics, "Aristogenics," Photography takes a closer look at how composite portraiture documented an idealized “reality” of the New England social-caste experience and explains how, when positioned in relation to the individual stories and portraits of members of the class, the portraits reveal points of non-conformity and rebellion with their own rhetoric.

Ancient farmers used draft animals for plowing but the heavy work of harvesting fell to the humans, using sickle and scythe. Change came in the mid-19th century when Cyrus Hall McCormick built the mechanical harvester. Though the McCormicks used their wealth to establish art collections and universities, battle disease, and develop birth control, members of the family faced constant scrutiny and scandal. This book recounts their story as well as the history of the International Harvester Company (IHC)--a merger of the McCormick and Deering companies and the world's leader in agricultural machinery in the 1900s.

How do religion and politics interact in America? Why is it that at certain periods in American history, religious and political thought have followed a parallel course while at other times they have moved in entirely different directions? To what extent have minority perspectives challenged the majority position on the religious and political issues that impinge on each other? These are among the many important and fascinating questions examined in this book, the first thorough historical survey of the multi-layered connections between religion and politics in the United States. This unique collection presents previously unpublished essays by seventeen of America's leading historians and social scientists, including John Murrin, Harry Stout, John F. Wilson, Daniel Walker Howe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Robert Swierenga, Martin Marty, Robert Wuthnow, and George Marsden. Together, these distinguished contributors provide comprehensive coverage of the historical interaction between religion and politics in America, from the colonial and Revolutionary periods, with intense commitments to and disagreements over religion, through the evangelical Protestant ascendency that marked the nineteenth century, to the growing pluralism and heightened antagonism between liberal and conservative factions that typify our own era.