Antiques.

The Meeting house, and Schoolhouse and Training Field are the Scoenes where New England men were formed....The Towns, Militia, Schools and Churches [are] the four Causes of the Grouth and Defence of N. England. The Virtues and Talents of the People are there formed. Their Temperance, Patience, Fortitude, Prudence, and Justice, as well as their Sagacity, Knowledge, Judgment, Taste, Skill, Ingenuity Dexterity and Industry.

John Adams, diary entry for July 21, 1786

New England has always had a coherence of its own. Even the landscape is almost perfectly in proportion, whether rendered in the paintings of Abbott Handerson Thayer and Willard Leroy Metcalf or in the photographs of the Allen sisters and Wallace Nutting, or as described in a play by Thornton Wilder, or observed by a summer tourist.

New England's past is a continuous repository of tradition, inheritance, bloodlines, stability, and perseverance that has endured for almost four centuries. In the face of uncontrolled geographic, demographic, and industrial expansion, New England was like a buttress supporting a mammoth arch spanning the continent. Its people defended a common culture against external forces of expansion and change.

The Revolution and the politics of the early Republic thrust New Englanders into a national arena that served to augment their sense of regional difference. Even before independence New England delegates to the Continental Congress complained of the popularity of dancing, the theater, and other worldly diversions in Philadelphia.

A nation within a nation, New England's cultural coherence derived from a high rate of literacy, a Puritan legacy and shared habits, customs, and institutions. Massachusetts has always been what John James Audubon called the "reading state," where Harvard College was founded in 1636; the first book printed in America was issued in Cambridge in 1640; and the first American newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, appeared in ...