Antiques.(American history influenced New England)

 
The houses that are of Modern Architecture are large & Exceeding neat 
this Sort is generally 3 Story high & well Sashed and Glazed with the 
best glass the rooms are well plastered and many Wainscoted or hung with 
painted paper from England the outside Clapboarded very neatly and are 
very warm and Comodious houses. 
Some Cursory Remarks Made by James Birket in His Voyage to North 
America, 1750-1751, ed. Charles M. Andrews (New Haven, 1916) 

Colonial New England evokes some of the most familiar images of American history and mythology--a world of Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, of pious founders and stern fathers, of clustered villages and white steepled churches. It was perhaps most famously likened to a "city upon a hill" by Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop. Unlike England's Mid-Atlantic, southern, and Caribbean colonies, middle-class families predominated in New England. Widespread property ownership among a free white population of farmers, artisans, and merchants, town-centered settlement patterns, and the establishment of such institutions as town meetings, self-governing churches, and public schools fostered in New England early America's most fully developed civic culture.

High rates of literacy and the establishment of the first two printing presses in the colonies enabled New Englanders to forge a powerful regional identity, and Puritan writers cultivated a sense of New England's moral and intellectual superiority. Over the centuries since, the people of New England have produced one of the great literary and artistic traditions of the world--an outpouring of poetry and portraits, of essays and landscapes, of fiction and history--that chronicles how the original dream of a godly commonwealth has been both sustained and transformed into a modern secular culture enriched by people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs.

Long before the modern dogma ...