New England: History
The Native Americans who first inhabited the northeast shoreline lived by farming and fishing along the coast in summer, retreating with their animals to the relative warmth of the inland valleys in winter. Though the Algonquin did not always live in harmony with each other, they did manage to repel the first European invaders, earning themselves five hundred years' grace, some time around 1000 AD, by forcing the Viking Leif Eriksson to abandon the settlement of Vinland the Good - which may have been anywhere between Newfoundland and Massachusetts.Within five years of Columbus's first voyage, John Cabot nosed by in 1497, in search of the Northwest Passage. Over the next century, European fishermen began to return each year, but it was not until the early 1600s that the French and English attempted to found permanent colonies, in what is now Maine. The name - New England - was given in 1614 by explorer John Smith, who particularly appreciated the plentiful lobsters.
This was not promising land: as a character in Robert Lowell's Endecott and the Cross put it, "I'm not a birdwatcher or an Indian … I don't see the point of this outpost of England." Without precious metals to be mined, or the potential to grow lucrative crops, the first major impetus for emigration was religion . Refugees from intolerance - notably the Puritans, beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620 - made the arduous voyage to search for the freedom to build their own communities. The Pilgrims only survived at first thanks to the Indians: they were aided by a certain Squanto, who had been kidnapped, sold as a slave in Spain and returned home via England. In return, the Pilgrims forced the natives from the terraces they had farmed for generations, dismissing as inappropriate their solution to the problems of survival in such terrain: "Their land is spacious and void, and there are few and do but run over the grass … They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it."
The possibility of a serious Native American threat was removed in King Philip's War of 1675-76, in which a leader of the Narragansett persuaded feuding groups to bury their differences in one last, and ultimately hopeless throw. By then, white colonization was beyond the stage where it could be controlled by a few high-minded zealots. The Salem witch trials of 1692 provided a salutary lesson on the potential dangers of fanaticism, and as immigration became less English-based, with influxes of Huguenots after 1680 and Irish in 1708, Puritan domination decreased and a definite class structure began to emerge.
While the strand of history that began with the Pilgrims is just one among many in the colonization of America - the Spanish were in Santa Fe before the Pilgrims ever left England - the metropolis of Boston deserves to be celebrated as the place where the great project of American independence first captured the popular imagination. The leading port of colonial America was always the likeliest focus of resentment against the latest impositions of the British government, and was ready to take up the challenge thrown down by British Prime Minister Townshend in 1766: "I dare tax America." So many of the seminal moments of the Revolutionary War took place here: the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Paul Revere's ride and the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
Once nationhood was secured, however, New England's prosperity was ironically hit hard by the loss of trade with England, and Boston was slowly eclipsed by Philadelphia, New York and the new capital, Washington. The Triangular Trade in slaves, sugar and rum provided one substitute source of income, the brief heyday of whaling another. New England was also momentarily at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution , when water-powered mills created a booming textile industry, most of which quickly moved south where wages were scandalously cheaper. The attempt to farm the north, however, foundered: careless techniques served to exhaust the land, and as the vast spaces of the west opened to settlement many of the inland towns fell silent.
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