Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to New England

Contents

Introduction to The USA

New England is where it all began for the modern United States, unlikely as it may seem from the sleepy, pristine villages and old-growth forests which characterize the area today. This is where the Pilgrim Fathers disembarked the Mayflower in 1620, and where the first seeds of American independence were sown in the last decades of the 18th century. Today it remains one of the most pleasant and prosperous corners of the country, easy to reach thanks to the great city of Boston and nearby megalopolis of New York, but with pockets of countryside so quiet it feels like a different country. Its natural beauty, indeed, is up there with anything in the USA, with spectacular mountain ranges in New Hampshire and Vermont and a famously fiery display of changing leaves in the autumn.

The sheer size of the country prevents any sort of overarching statement about the typical American experience, just as the diversity of its people undercuts any notion of the typical American. This holds true for New England, which is home across some 70,000 square miles to Irish Americans, Italian Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans and Latinos, as well as those who have upped sticks from elsewhere in the country: Texan cowboys and Bronx hustlers, Seattle hipsters and Alabama pastors, Las Vegas showgirls and Hawaiian surfers. Though it often sounds clichd to foreigners, the only thing that holds this bizarre federation together is the oft-maligned American Dream . While the USA is one of the worlds oldest still-functioning democracies and the roots of its European presence go back to the 1500s, the palpable sense of newness here creates an odd sort of optimism, wherein anything seems possible and fortune can strike at any moment. New England may be most famous for its natural landscapes and social history, but it has produced its share of American pop culture icons, too: Jack Kerouac, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King are among the New England luminaries in the world of letters, while Aerosmith, the Dropkick Murphys, John Mayer and The Cars are among the pop music denizens to have emerged from this part of the country.

Aspects of American culture can be difficult for many visitors to understand, despite the apparent familiarity: the national obsession with guns; the widely held belief that government is bad; the real, genuine pride in the American Revolution and the US Constitution, two hundred years on; the equally genuine belief that the USA is the greatest country on earth; the wild grandstanding of its politicians (especially at election time); and the bewildering contradiction of its great liberal and open-minded traditions with laissez-faire capitalism and extreme cultural and religious conservatism. Thats America: diverse, challenging, beguiling, maddening at times, but always entertaining and always changing. And while there is no such thing as a typical American person or landscape, there can be few places where strangers can feel so confident of a warm reception. All these curiosities and contradictions are as true of New England as they are of the rest of the country, even while generally speaking, New England is politically liberal and represented by the Democrats, Vermont, for example, has some of the most lax gun control laws in the country.

Colonial architecture in Massachusetts

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Where to go

The most rewarding American expeditions are often those that take in more than one town, city, or state. You do not, however, have to cross the entire continent from shore to shore in order to appreciate its amazing diversity; it would take a long time to see the whole country, and the more time you spend simply travelling, the less time youll have to savour the small-town pleasures and backroad oddities that may well provide your strongest memories. Unless youre travelling to and within a centralized location such as Boston, youll need a car that mandatory component of life in New England, as elsewhere in the USA.

The obvious place to start for most people is Boston the capital of Massachusetts, the cultural, political and financial hub of wider New England, and one of the most important cities in American history. The Freedom Trail, taking in some of the citys most important historical sights, is a must for history buffs; so too is a visit to Plymouth, Massachusetts, Americas Hometown, where the Pilgrim Fathers first established a colony after stepping off the Mayflower in 1620.

Wider New England has a varied appeal; theres much more to the region once you venture beyond Bostons colonial history into its rural byways, which lead to centuries-old villages in Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the winding river valleys of Connecticut. History echoes through every forest and town in this storied interior, whether in the hallowed university halls of Cambridge or the haunted town of Salem, where dozens of people were killed as a result of mass hysteria in the tragic 17th-century witch trials. Such spectres lurk around every corner in New England, their potency enhanced by their juxtaposition with the white picket fences and neatly manicured lawns of the regions prosperous suburban settlements such that, when you visit, its easy to imagine why New England has proved such a fertile source of inspiration to the staggeringly successful horror writer Stephen King.

As captivating as the human history is the countryside which encloses it. To see New England in the fall, when the changing seasons turn its autumn leaves into a blazing inferno of red, ochre and gold, is a justifiably famous bucket-list activity but this is a gorgeous place year-round. Its easy to share in the awe that must have been felt by early visitors to Maines Mount Desert Island now protected as the Acadia National Park where craggy coastal bluffs are smothered in pine forest and Cadillac Mountain soars to the highest point in the eastern United States. Vermont is the sixth-smallest US state and the second-least populated behind the virtually empty Wyoming; its forest trails, winding from the Green Mountains to the Connecticut River, are ripe for road-tripping, cycling, and hiking.

Indeed, New Englands variegated charms show no sign of abating as you approach the coast. Bayside Provincetown in Massachusetts is a vibrant town which has long served as a favoured vacation spot and lifestyle hub for the LGBTQ+ community, while the lobster-catching harbours and coastal mountains of Maine are characterised by a bold and rugged individualism, nowhere better expressed than in the thriving city of Portland.

Cape Cod and its surrounding islands, meanwhile, are waspy and wealthy, attracting well-heeled holidaymakers from New York and Boston to nestle in country inns and feast at farmhouse restaurants on cloistered outposts like Marthas Vineyard. Rhode Island, too, draws moneyed Americans and foreign visitors in equal measure, who moor their yachts in Newport to see and be seen in the towns oyster bars and the stately colonial architecture retains the classy patina of the Gilded Age.

New Englands literary luminaries