25 Research Drive
Westborough
Massachusetts
01582
United States
History of New England Electric System
New England Electric System (NEES) is a public utility holding company that derives its revenues from electric power that its generating company subsidiary, New England Power Company, sells to its retail subsidiaries. These, in turn, sell electricity directly to residential and industrial customers. The retail subsidiaries are Massachusetts Electric Company, Narragansett Electric Company in Rhode Island, and Granite State Electric Company in New Hampshire. NEES's market share of state electricity sales is 73.2% in Rhode Island, 35% in Massachusetts, and 6.1% in New Hampshire; in terms of the six-state New England region, NEES's market share is about 20%. Other NEES subsidiaries include a second wholesale generating company, three transmission companies, a service company, and an oil and gas exploration and fuels company.
The company traces its origins back to 1906, when Malcolm Chace and Henry Harriman obtained charters from Vermont and New Hampshire to construct a dam and hydroelectric generating plant at Vernon, Vermont. Even in 1910, when the Vernon plant began to transmit electric power to industries in central Massachusetts, the structure of the Chace-Harriman operations was complex. There was a company formed under the more liberal corporation laws of Maine, the Connecticut River Power Company of Maine, and a holding company, the Massachusetts Company, as well as two operating companies, the Connecticut River Power Company of New Hampshire and the Connecticut River Transmission Company. The Massachusetts Company, not subject to the regulations on public utilities, was able to issue and hold securities and therefore had greater flexibility in financing. Within a few years Chace and Harriman expanded their hydroelectric operations to include one plant on the Connecticut River at Bellows Falls, Vermont, and several plants along the Deerfield River in Massachusetts. The New England Power Company was established to develop the Deerfield projects and to manage the electricity transmission lines in Massachusetts. The combined operations of the companies became known as New England Power System during this period.
As neither the Connecticut River nor the Deerfield River had a sufficiently large flow of water, especially during the summer months, to serve as a single, reliable source of electricity, Chace and Harriman decided to secure additional sources from thermal units, in which steam-driven turbines, rather than falling water, produced electricity. In the early years, they did this through sharing arrangements with the thermal plants of local lighting companies in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Later, they purchased or constructed their own steam-generating plants.
In 1926 the New England Power System, the Northeastern Power Corporation, Stone & Webster, and International Paper Company formed New England Power Association (NEPA). This Massachusetts voluntary association had sufficient funds to purchase a number of smaller electric and gas companies in New England. By the 1930s, NEPA controlled 26 hydroelectric stations, 17 steam-generating plants, and more than 2,000 miles of transmission lines.
The Great Depression and the World War II years were difficult for NEPA financially. Annual earnings from 1933 through 1937 were lower than those of 1932, although sales rose, and full preferred dividend amounts were paid only three times between 1935 and 1946. Part of the problem lay in the fact that state authorities would not allow the retail companies to increase their charges for electricity, and the complicated network of holding companies prevented operating company mergers that could have resulted in economies of scale in production and distribution.
In 1942, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered NEPA to simplify its corporate structure. An acceptable reorganization was not worked out until 1947, when NEPA emerged as New England Electric System, a new holding company that replaced five former holding companies and reduced 18 different classes of securities to 2. NEES at this time was the largest electric utility system in New England, with 10,000 employees serving a population of 2.5 million.
The postwar years, and especially the 1960s, were a period of prosperity and reorganization for NEES. Electricity demand increased at an annual average of 7.7% in New England, and NEES revenues from electricity sales, and from the distribution and sale of manufactured and natural gas in Massachusetts, rose from $160 million in 1961 to $251 million in 1969. During this period the company gradually sold off a number of its generating units. In 1960, it operated 22 hydroelectric plants and 13 steam-generating plants, and in 1970, only 13 hydroelectric plants and 8 steam-generating plants. The number of employees in 1970 had fallen to 7,000. The main change in its retail operations involved the merger of a number of small electric companies to form the Massachusetts Electric Company in 1961. Some of this reorganization resulted from federal regulation. In 1957 the SEC ordered NEES to divest its minority interest in a number of small electricity subsidiaries and, in 1958, opened hearings regarding the company's natural gas distribution and sales outlets. NEES appealed the commission's 1964 order that it dispose of these up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the SEC ruling in 1968. The company subsequently sold off its eight gas companies gradually over the next few years.
In 1967 the three major electric utilities in New England, NEES, Boston Edison Company, and Northeast Utilities, began merger talks; Northeast Utilities later withdrew from these negotiations and was replaced by Eastern Utilities Associates. A corporate affiliation plan was drawn up in mid-1968 and presented to the SEC. The Justice Department opposed the merger, but an SEC hearing officer approved it in 1972, subject to certain conditions; the three utilities objected to these and the proposal was referred to the full SEC, which denied the application early in 1975.
In the 1960s electricity generating plants burning oil were fairly inexpensive to build and run and had cleaner emissions than those burning coal. By 1969 all NEES steam-generating plants were burning oil, including several that had previously burned coal, and, in 1971, the company announced the construction of a new large oil-fired power plant in Salem, Massachusetts. By the mid-1970s, oil was providing 78% of NEES's energy requirements, and the company ranked third among U.S. electric utilities in its dependence on oil. It was therefore very vulnerable to the effects of the oil price and supply crises of this period and concerned about government proposals to levy import fees on foreign oil.
In 1979 to counter this threat, NEES President Guy Nichols, later credited with building NEES into one of the region's strongest utilities, announced a 15-year plan to reduce the company's use of foreign oil and to keep customers' electricity costs to a minimum through conservation measures and load growth management. To lower the share of oil in its energy requirements to less than 10% by 1996, the company decided to convert some of its oil-fired generating plants to coal burning. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted a temporary waiver of pollution-control rules in 1979 to permit the conversion of NEES's biggest generating station at Brayton Point in Somerset, Massachusetts. The conversion of three of its Brayton Point units to coal burning, which was completed in the early 1980s, was the first large-scale conversion of an oil-burning generating plant by a U.S. electric utility. NEES then proceeded with a second major conversion of three of its oil-burning units at Salem. To ensure coal supplies for its plants, NEES contracted for the construction of its own coal-carrying ship in 1980. Energy Independence, the first coalfired ship built in the United States since 1929, began carrying coal up the eastern seaboard to Brayton Point in 1983.
NEES also reduced its dependency on oil by using, on a small scale, alternative energy sources for electricity generation, such as wood, windmills, solid waste, and small hydroelectric projects. To secure oil for the steam-generating units it could not convert to coal burning, NEES established a partnership with Noble Affiliates, an independent oil producer, to drill and develop domestic oil wells. By 1984 the percentage of oil used for NEES energy requirements had fallen to around 25%, and by 1990, the company's fuel mix was 22% oil, 42% coal, 19% nuclear, 8% hydroelectricity, 3% natural gas, and 6% alternative energy sources. The latter included 32 lowhead hydroelectric plants, 79 wind or solar generators, 4 trash-burning plants, and 24 cogenerators--facilities producing thermal energy and electricity from the same source.
To meet the second goal of keeping customers' electricity bills to a minimum, NEES focused on slow growth. Peak load capacity--the amount of generating capacity that an electric utility needs to satisfy residential and commercial demand at its highest point in the day--determines the amount of generating capacity that the utility must have. The NEES slow-growth strategy involved an extensive conservation and load management (C & LM) program designed to reduce the annual peak load growth for the mid-1990s from the previous forecast of 3.1% to 1.9%. Achieving this would reduce the need for constructing additional generating capacity by the 1990s; it would also eliminate the need for rate increases for customers to pay for plant construction. The C & LM program included rate discounts to large industrial, commercial, and residential users for off-peak--9 PM to 8 AM--use of electricity; the dispatch of energy audit teams to customers to give them free energy-saving tips; the promotion, through rate incentives, of the installation of heat and/or cooling storage systems; the holding of large public programs on energy conservation; and the initiation of a solar project.
For additional generating capacity to meet the lower peak load growth, NEES intended to rely on nuclear power, hydroelectric projects, and natural gas-burning plants. Nuclear power was a significant source of energy in New England in the 1970s, and its seven nuclear power plants supplied about 28% of the region's power, more than double the national figure of 12%. New England Power, the NEES generating company subsidiary, was a stockholder in the Massachusetts-based Yankee Rowe, Vermont Yankee, Connecticut Yankee, and Maine Yankee nuclear power plants completed between 1961 and 1972. Its ownership in these varied between 30% and 15%, and it purchased electricity in accordance with these ownership percentages.
In 1974 NEES announced plans to build a nuclear power station in Charlestown, Rhode Island. The Three Mile Island accident in March 1979, however, resulted in new safety requirements for nuclear plants, making them much more expensive to build and operate. Late in 1979, NEES canceled plans for the Charlestown plant. At the time, it still had a stake in three nuclear projects scheduled for completion in the 1980s: the Millstone 3 plant in Waterford, Connecticut; the Pilgrim II plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and the two Seabrook plants in New Hampshire. Construction of Pilgrim II was canceled in 1981, but Millstone 3, in which NEES had a 12.2% share, became operational in 1986. The Seabrook project, however, had serious problems, with estimates of construction costs for Seabrook 2, some 17% complete, having risen from $900 million in 1972 to $5.24 billion by the early 1980s.
In 1983 NEES announced that it wanted to sell its 10% interest in Seabrook 2 but to retain its interest in Seabrook 1, then 70% complete. If it could not sell its share of Seabrook 2, it proposed that the project be canceled, and eventually it was. In 1985 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ruled that NEES could charge its customers for construction costs on Pilgrim II and, in 1986, for the construction costs of Seabrook 2. The main investor in Seabrook 2, Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH), however, did not fall under FERC jurisdiction, and its rates were regulated entirely by the state public utility commission. PSNH filed for bankruptcy in 1988 after the courts barred it from passing along the Seabrook 2 costs to its customers. NEES then submitted a bid to buy PSNH, exclusive of its shares in Seabrook 2, but dropped its offer when other utilities submitted higher bids.
The Seabrook 1 nuclear plant was completed in late 1986, but the Chernobyl accident in April of that year led the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to refuse to license the plant for commercial operation until emergency response measures were in place. These measures were subject to review by the states. Seabrook is located two miles from the Massachusetts border, and for four years Massachusetts refused to submit the evacuation plan the commission required. Seabrook I finally started commercial operations in June 1990.
NEES continued to follow its slow-growth program through the 1980s even though growth in electricity demand in New England between 1982 and 1988 generally was more than 5% per year, considerably higher than the NEES forecast. In 1985 Samuel Huntington, who had succeeded Guy Nichols as chief executive officer, announced further measures to provide an adequate supply of electricity at the lowest possible cost and to encourage customers to use electricity efficiently and economically. The company's subsidiary, NEES Energy, began to provide energy conservation services under contracts that provided for sharing of resultant energy savings between the company and customers. In 1989, the SEC approved the application of NEES Energy to expand its business and to participate in cogeneration projects.
When high electricity demand in New England resulted in voltage reductions during the summers of 1987 and 1988, the wisdom of a slow-growth program was questioned by a rival utility, Northeast Utilities, which noted that NEES then had no spare generating capacity. The recession, however, lessened the pressure on NEES as the annual increase in electricity demand in the region fell to 2.0% in 1989, down from 5.4% in 1988.
In July 1988 CEO Samuel Huntington was killed during a lightning storm. A successor, John Rowe, was not selected until December of that year. In the interim, Chairman Joan T. Bok, long the highest woman executive in the electric utility industry, assumed CEO responsibility.
In the late 1980s, NEES decided to include natural gas as a fuel source and announced plans to expand and convert its Providence, Rhode Island, oil-fired plant to natural gas by 1995. It also planned to add the capability of burning natural gas at its oil-fired Brayton unit in Somerset, Massachusetts. In addition, in 1988 it formed the Narragansett Energy Resources Company to take a 20% interest in Ocean State Power, a general partnership established to build, own, and operate a gas-fired electric power plant in Burrillville, Rhode Island. The first unit of the Ocean State Power plant was operational in late 1990; the second was scheduled for completion in 1991.
For additional hydroelectric power, NEES tapped Canadian sources through arrangements with the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL), a consortium of New England utilities that coordinates the generation and transmission facilities of its members. In 1983 NEPOOL had made an agreement with Hydro-Quebec, the electric utility owned by the province of Quebec, to purchase sufficient surplus power generated by hydroelectric stations in the James Bay region to meet 3% to 4% of the region's energy needs. NEES has been heavily involved in the building of many of the direct-current transmission lines and terminals required to link the Canadian and New England electric systems. The first stage in the Hydro-Quebec project went into operation in 1987; the second in late 1990.
At the start of the 1990s, NEES was doing well. The two new nuclear plants in which it had a share, Millstone Unit 3 and Seabrook 1, the Hydro-Quebec hydroelectric project, and the Ocean State Power gas plant were all in operation. Its oil and gas exploration subsidiary, which had been operating at a loss, was being wound down, and the coal-carrying ship, which it owned, had been sold to Keystone Shipping Co., which would continue to transport coal to NEES's generating stations. Revenues were up. Whether the company would be able to continue its slow-growth policy once the recession of the early 1990s lifted in New England, however, was not certain. It also had to reduce its power plants' emissions because of the 1990 Clean Air Act.
Principal Subsidiaries: New England Power Company; Massachusetts Electric Company; The Narragansett Electric Company; Granite State Electric Company; Narragansett Energy Resources Company; New England Energy Incorporated; New England Electric Transmission Corporation; New England Hydro-Transmission Corporation; New England HydroTransmission Electric Company, Inc.; New England Power Service Company.
Related information about New England
A region of NE USA, comprising the states of Maine, New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
The main area of English settlement in the 17th-c, several of the
colonies initially formed themselves into a New England
Confederation. A century later, the region was the centre of the
independence movement in the years before the American Revolution,
and at other times has been a leader in educational and
intellectual movements.
For other uses of this name, see New England
(disambiguation).
New England is a region of the United States located in
the northeastern corner of the country. It comprises the states of
Connecticut,
Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The region's most
populous city, as well as its business and cultural center, is
Boston.
The region was inhabited by indigenous peoples when English Pilgrims, fleeing religious persecution in
Europe, arrived nearly
four hundred years ago, at
the beginning of the 17th century. In the 18th century, New England
was one of the first North American British colonies to demonstrate ambitions of independence from
the British Crown,
although it would later oppose the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. In the 19th
century, it played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States,
became a source of some of the first examples of American literature
and philosophy, and
showed the first signs of the effects of the Industrial
Revolution in North America."New England," Microsoft速 Encarta速
Online Encyclopedia 2006 encarta.msn.com 息
1997-2006 Microsoft Corporation. Together, the Mid-Atlantic and New
England regions are referred to as the Northeastern region of
the United States. New England is also a part of the greater
U.S.-Canada Atlantic Northeast
region.
History
New England has long been inhabited by Algonquian-speaking native
peoples, including the Abenaki, the Penobscot, the Wampanoag, and others. The Wampanoag occupied southeastern Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, and the islands of Martha's Vineyard
and Nantucket.
On April 10, 1606, James I of England
chartered the Virginia Companies of London and Plymouth. www.nps.gov/colo/Jthanout/TobaccoHistory.html Captain John Smith,
exploring the shores of the region in 1614, named the region "New
England"New England. Retrieved June 20, 2006, from Encyclop脱dia
Britannica Premium Service: www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9055457 in his
account of two voyages there, published as A Description of New England.
This name was officially sanctioned on November 3, 1620, when the charter of the Virginia Company of
Plymouth was replaced by a royal charter for the Plymouth
Council for New England, a joint stock company established to colonize and govern
the region."...joint stock company organized in 1620 by a charter
from the British crown with authority to colonize and govern the
area now known as New England." Retrieved July 13, 2006, from
Encyclop脱dia Britannica Premium Service: www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9055458 Shortly
afterwards, in December 1620, a permanent settlement was
established at present-day Plymouth,
Massachusetts by the Pilgrims, English religious separatists arriving via
Holland. Banished from
Massachusetts, Roger
Williams led a group south, and founded Providence, Rhode
Island in 1636. At this time, Vermont was yet unsettled, and
the territories of New
Hampshire and Maine
were governed by Massachusetts.
In these early years, relationships between colonists and Native
Americans alternated between peace and armed skirmishes. Six years
after the bloodiest of these, the Pequot War, in 1643 the colonies of Massachusetts
Bay, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut joined together in a loose compact
called the New England Confederation (officially "The United
Colonies of New England"). The confederation was designed largely
to coordinate mutual defense against possible wars with Native
Americans, the Dutch in the New Netherland colony to the west, the Spanish in the south, and the
French in New France to the north, as
well as to assist in the return of runaway slaves. Available at: www.coin-collecting.info/American/early.html (Accessed
14 August 2006). In 1686, King James II, concerned about the increasingly
independent ways of the colonies, including their self-governing
charters, open flouting of the Navigation Acts, and increasing military power,
established the Dominion of New England, an administrative union
comprising all of the New England colonies. Two years later, the
provinces of New York (New Amsterdam) and the New Jersey,
seized from the Dutch, were added. This tension culminated itself
in the American
Revolution, boiling over with the breakout of the American War of
Independence in 1776. copyright expired).
Aside from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, or "New Scotland," New England is the only North American region to
inherit the name of a kingdom in the British Isles. Today, the
region is more ethnically diverse, having seen waves of immigration from Ireland, Qu辿bec, Italy, Asia, Latin America, Africa, other parts of the United States, and elsewhere.
The enduring European influence can be seen in the region, from
Massachusetts' use of traffic rotaries to the bilingual French and English towns of
northern Vermont and New Hampshire, as innocuous as the sprinkled
use of British spelling, and as obvious as the region's unique
dialect.
Geography and climate
New England's geography is the result of retreating ice sheets
that shaped the landscape thousands of years ago, leaving behind
rolling hills, mountains, and a jagged coastline. Mount
Washington, at 1,917 m (6,288 ft), in New Hampshire's White
Mountains, is the highest peak in New England. Vermont's
Green Mountains,
which become the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts, are smaller
than the White Mountains. Valleys in the region include the
Connecticut
River Valley and the Merrimack Valley.
The region has many rivers and streams. The longest is the Connecticut River,
which flows from northeastern New Hampshire for 655 km (407 mi)
until it empties into the Long Island Sound. Lake Champlain, between
Vermont and New York, is the largest lake in the region.
The climate in New England is known for its unpredictability, and
it varies throughout the region. As of 2000, the total population
of New England was 13,922,517.www.planning.state.ri.us/census/pdf%20files/pdf/NE1800-2000.PDF
If New England were one state, its population would rank 5th in the
nation, behind Florida.
Western
Massachusetts is less densely populated than eastern
Massachusetts.
Southwestern Connecticut has grown rapidly in population since
1970, as many corporations formerly headquartered in Manhattan moved to nearby
Fairfield County to take advantage of lower taxes while
still staying within the general region, bringing jobs and "New
York transplants." After nearly 400 years, the region still
maintains, for the most part, its historical population
layout.
New England's coast is dotted with urban centers, such as Portland, Portsmouth,
Boston,
New
Bedford, Fall River, Newport, Providence,
New
Haven, and Bridgeport, as well as smaller cities, like Newburyport, Gloucester,
Biddeford,
Bath, Rockland, and New London.
The smaller fishing towns, like Gloucester, are popular tourist
attractions, as they tend to retain their historical character, and
often have colorful pasts.
Cape Cod, the signature
hook-shaped peninsula of Massachusetts, also a popular tourist
attraction, is lined with sandy beaches and dotted with bed and breakfast
tourist lodgings. Indeed, southern New England forms an integral
part of the BosWash
megalopolis, a
conglomeration of urban centers that spans from Boston to
- Providence, Rhode Island: 173,618
- Worcester, Massachusetts: 172,648
- Springfield, Massachusetts: 152,082
- Bridgeport, Connecticut: 139,529
- Hartford, Connecticut: 124,558
- New Haven,
Connecticut: 123,626
- Stamford, Connecticut: 117,083
- Waterbury, Connecticut: 107,271
- Manchester, New Hampshire: 107,006
- Lowell, Massachusetts: 105,167
During the 20th century, urban expansion has made the New York
metropolitan area an important economic influence on Fairfield
County and New
Haven in southwestern Connecticut.
Economy
Several factors contribute to the uniqueness of the New England
economy. Exports consist mostly of
industrial products, including specialized machines and weaponry, built by the region's
educated workforce.
New England also exports food products, ranging from fish to maple syrup. The U.S. Department
of Commerce has called the New England economy a microcosm for
the entire United States economy."Background on the New England
Economy." The metropolitan statistical area (MSA) with the
lowest rate, 2.5%, was Burlington-South Burlington, in Vermont; the MSA
with the highest rate, 7.9%, was Lawrence-Methuen-Salem MA NH, in Massachusetts and
southern New Hampshire.www.bls.gov/xg_shells/ro1xg02.htm#lf
New England is home to two of the ten poorest cities in the United
States: Providence, RI and Hartford, CT www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-19.pdf. Available at:
www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Ag_Overview/AgOverview_VT.pdf
and Connecticut and Massachusetts seventh and eleventh for tobacco, respectively.U.S.
Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics
Service. Available at: www.bea.gov/bea/newsrel/gspnewsrelease.htm (Accessed 19
July 2005).
Politics
The early European settlers of New England were English Protestants fleeing
religious persecution. This is the strongest example of direct democracy in the
United States today, and the form of dialogue has been adopted
under certain circumstances elsewhere, most strongly in the states
closest to the region, such as New York, New
Jersey and Pennsylvania. Rotberg review REAL DEMOCRACY: THE NEW
ENGLAND TOWN MEETING AND HOW IT WORKS at democraciaparticipativa.net/libros/RealDemocracyNewEnglandTownMeeting.htm
(Accessed 19 July 2006).
New England and political thought
During the colonial period and the early years of the American
republic, New England leaders like John Hancock, John Adams, and Samuel Adams joined those in Philadelphia and Virginia
to assist and lead the newly-forming country. At the time of the
American Civil
War, New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest, which had
long since abolished slavery, united against the Confederate
States of America, ending the practice in the United States.
Henry David
Thoreau, iconic New England writer and philosopher, made the
case for civil
disobedience and libertarianism, and has been adopted by the anarchist tradition. A modern
example of this spirit is the Free State Project in New Hampshire.
While modern New England is known for its liberal tendencies,
Puritan New England was highly intolerant of any deviation from
strict social norms. Available at: www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/school-integration/boston/index.html
(Accessed 19 July 2006)
Contemporary politics
Today, the dominant party in New England is the Democratic Party, sending six Democrats to the U.S. Senate and sixteen
Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives, compared to five
Republican senators and five Republican representatives,
respectively. In the 2000
presidential election, Democratic candidate Al Gore carried all of the New
England states except for New Hampshire, and in 2004,
John Kerry, a New
Englander himself, won all six New England states."2006 Political
Party Breakdown by State." Available at: www.thegreenpapers.com/G06/PPBDTraditional.phtml
(Accessed 19 July 2006). Additionally, in both the 2000 and 2004
presidential elections, every congressional district with the
exception of New Hampshire's 1st district were won by Gore and Kerry
respectively.
New England abolished the death penalty for crimes like robbery and burglary in
the 19th century, before much of the rest of the United States did.
Available at: www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state/ (Accessed 19 July 2006).
although New Hampshire currently has no death row inmates and has not held an execution
since 1939. Available at: www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,145681,00.html (Accessed 19
July 2006).
Vermont was the first state to allow civil unions between same sex couples, and
Massachusetts was the first state to allow same-sex marriage
between same sex couples. In 2005, Connecticut also began to allow civil
unions.
As of 2006,
Massachusetts is the only state with a plan to adopt a system of
universal
health care for its citizens.www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401937.html
In 2006, Deval
Patrick, an African American, won the Democratic party's
nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. The southwestern part of
the state is largely suburban, and as part of the New York
metropolitan area, is culturally tied more with New York City than the
rest of the New England region. The remainder of the state,
however, is culturally similar to neighboring Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Cultural roots
The first European colonists of New England were focused on
maritime affairs such as
whaling and fishing, rather than more
continental
inclinations such as surplus farming. One of the older American regions, New England
has developed a distinct cuisine, dialect,
architecture, and government. clam chowder, lobster, and other products of the sea are
among some of the region's most popular foods.
Accents
The often-parodied
Boston accent (see
Mayor Quimby of
The
Simpsons) is native to the region. Many of its most
stereotypical features (such as r-dropping
and the so-called broad
A) are the result of influence of high-prestige English accents
on Boston's upper
class. The Boston accent and accents closely related to it
cover eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, though there
is of course significant dialect variation within this area.
Also found in New England is the distinctively conservative
dialect of Rhode Island
(parodied by Peter
Griffin and Lois
Griffin of Family
Guy). The accent family of western New England (most of
Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and Vermont) differs sharply
from the Boston accent to its east and the New York
accent to its southwest, but is thought to be closely related
to the so-called Inland North accent of the Great Lakes region due west
of it, to which western New England contributed many early
settlers.
Social activities and music
Bars
and pubs, especially those
with Irish themes, are popular social venues. Closer to Boston,
musicians from Ireland often tour pubs, playing
traditional Irish
folk music, usually
with a singer, a fiddler, and a guitarist. This area also has thriving hardcore, punk, and indie rock music scenes.
Surf rock was
pioneered by Dick Dale
of Quincy,
Massachusetts, and the Pixies, of Boston, influenced the grunge movement of
the 1990s. Dropkick
Murphys, from South
Boston, mix hardcore and punk music with Irish music in a style
known as Celtic
Punk.
In much of rural New England, particularly Maine, Acadian and
Quebecois culture also dominate the region's music and dance.
Contra dancing
and country square
dancing are popular throughout New England, usually backed by
live Irish, Acadian, or other folk music.
Traditional knitting,
quilting and rug hooking
circles in rural New England have become less common; church, sports, and town government are more typical social activities.
Media
New England has several regional broadcasting companies,
including New
England Cable News (NECN) and the New England
Sports Network (NESN) as well as the national cable sports
broadcaster ESPN in Bristol Connecticut. Its studios are located in
Newton,
Massachusetts, outside of Boston, although it maintains bureaus
in Manchester, New Hampshire; Available at: www.boston.com/news/necn/About/
(Accessed 19 July 2006).
The New England Sports Network covers New England sports teams
throughout the region, save for Fairfield County, Connecticut.New
England Sports Network. The first such institution, Harvard, was founded at Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to train preachers, in 1636. Yale University, in
New Haven was founded
in 1701 and awarded the first Ph.D. According to US News and World
Report, 8 of the nation's top-50 universities and 13 of its top-50 liberal arts
colleges are located in New England. These include four out of
the eight universities in the Ivy League (Harvard University, Yale University, Brown University, and
Dartmouth
College), Tufts
University, Boston College, Colby College, Bates College, Bowdoin College,the College of the
Holy Cross, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Middlebury College,
Williams
College, Amherst
College, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, Trinity
College, Rhode Island School of Design, and others.
At the pre-college level, New England is home to a majority of the
most prominent American independent schools (also known as private schools), such as
Phillips
Academy in Massachusetts, St. Paul's School and Phillips Exeter
Academy in New Hampshire, the prestigious Choate Rosemary
Hall, Hotchkiss
School, Cheshire Academy, Hopkins Grammar
School, Avon Old
Farms and Loomis
Chaffee in Connecticut, and the schools of the prestigious
Independent School League. The concept of the
elite "New England prep school" and the "preppy" lifestyle is an iconic part of the
region's image.
New England states also fund their public schools well, with high
spending rates per student and teacher salaries higher than
elsewhere. Taken from the New York Post, available at:
www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/64304.htm (Accessed 19
July 2006).
New England is home to several prominent academic journals and
publishing companies, including The New
England Journal of Medicine, Harvard University
Press, and Yale University Press. Also, many of its institutions
lead the open access
alternative to conventional academic publication, including
MIT, the University of
Connecticut, and the University of Maine. Ralph Waldo Emerson
was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau
was born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he famously lived, for
some time, by Walden
Pond, on Emerson's land. Nathaniel Hawthorne, romantic era writer, was
born in historical Salem; Robert Lowell, Confessionalist poet and teacher of Sylvia Plath, was also a
New England native. Current U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall continues the line of renowned New England
poets. New England is also the setting for most of the gothic horror stories of
H.P. Real New England
towns such as Ipswich, Newburyport, Rowley, and
Marblehead are given fictional names such as Dunwich,
Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, and Miskatonic and then featured
quite often in his stories.
The region has also drawn the attention of authors and poets from
other parts of the United States. John Updike, originally from Pennsylvania, eventually
moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which served as the model for
the fictional New England town of Tarbox in his 1968 novel Couples. Robert Frost was born in
California, but moved
to Massachusetts during his teen years and published his first poem
in Lawrence; Arthur Miller, a New York City native, used New England as the setting
for some of his works, most notably The Crucible.
More recently, Stephen
King, born in Portland, Maine, has used the small towns of his home
state as the setting for much of his horror fiction, with several
of his stories taking place in or near the fictional town of Castle
Rock. Just to the south, Exeter, New Hampshire was the birthplace of
best-selling novelist John Irving and Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code.
Rick Moody has set
many of his works in southern New England, focusing on wealthy
families of suburban Connecticut's Gold Coast and
their battles with addiction and anomie.
Largely on the strength of its local writers, Boston was for some years the
center of the U.S. publishing industry, before being overtaken by
New York in
the middle of the nineteenth century. Boston remains the home of
publishers Houghton
Mifflin and Pearson Education, and was the longtime home of literary
magazine The
Atlantic Monthly. Merriam-Webster is based in Springfield,
Massachusetts. Basketball was invented by James Naismith in
Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891.inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbasketball.htm
Volleyball was
invented by William G. Morgan in Holyoke,
Massachusetts, in 1895.www.volleyball.org/history.html The
earliest known written reference to the sport of baseball is a 1791
Pittsfield, Massachusetts by-law banning the playing of
the game within 80 yards of the town's new meeting house.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3710967.stm
Professional and Semi Professional Sports Teams in New
England
-
Baseball:
-
Major League Baseball
- Boston
Red Sox (Boston, Massachusetts)
-
International League (AAA)
- Pawtucket Red Sox (Pawtucket, Rhode Island)
-
Eastern League (AA)
- New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Manchester, New Hampshire)
- Portland Sea Dogs (Portland,
Maine)
- Connecticut Defenders (Norwich,
Connecticut)
- New Britain Rock Cats (New
Britain, Connecticut)
-
New York - Penn League (A)
- Lowell
Spinners (Lowell, Massachusetts)
- Vermont Lake Monsters (Burlington,
Vermont)
-
Atlantic
League (Independent)
- Bridgeport Bluefish (Bridgeport, Connecticut)
-
Canadian-American Association of Professional
Baseball (Independent)
- Brockton
Rox (Brockton, Massachusetts)
- Nashua
Pride (Nashua, New Hampshire)
- New Haven County Cutters (New
Haven, Connecticut)
- North Shore Spirit (Lynn,
Massachusetts)
- Worcester Tornadoes (Worcester, Massachusetts)
-
Football:
-
National Football League
- New England Patriots (Foxboro,
Massachusetts)
-
Af2(Minor League
Arena
Football)
- Manchester Wolves (Manchester, New Hampshire)
-
Basketball:
-
National Basketball Association
- Boston
Celtics (Boston, Massachusetts)
-
Women's National Basketball
Association
- Connecticut Sun (Uncasville, Connecticut)
-
American Basketball
Association(Independent Minor League)
- Cape
Cod Frenzy (Sandwich, Massachusetts)
- Vermont Frost Heaves (Burlington,
Vermont and Barre, Vermont)
-
Hockey:
-
National Hockey League
-
American Hockey League(AAA)
- Lowell
Devils (Lowell, Massachusetts)
- Bridgeport Sound Tigers (Bridgeport, Connecticut)
- Hartford Wolf Pack (Hartford,
Connecticut)
- Manchester Monarchs (Manchester, New Hampshire)
- Portland Pirates (Portland,
Maine)
- Springfield Falcons (Springfield, Massachusetts)
- Worcester Sharks (Worcester, Massachusetts)
- Providence Bruins (Providence, Rhode Island)
-
Soccer:
-
Major
League Soccer
- New England Revolution (Foxboro,
Massachusetts)
-
United Soccer Leagues
- New Hampshire Phantoms (Hampstead, New Hampshire)
-
USL Premier Development League
- Cape Cod Crusaders (Hyannis,
Massachusetts)
- Rhode Island Stingrays (Providence, Rhode Island)
- Vermont Voltage (St. Albans,
Vermont)
-
Lacrosse:
-
Major League Lacrosse
- Boston
Cannons (Boston, Massachusetts)
New Hampshire International Speedway (Loudon, New
Hampshire)
In the southwestern part of the state, many Connecticut
residents support the New York Yankees and other New York pro teams.
The region also has a rich heritage in high school and college
athletics. The Boston Marathon, run on Patriot's Day every
year, is a New England cultural institution. The following places
are replete with historic buildings, parks, and
streetscapes:
- Boston and its
surrounding
area
- Plymouth, Massachusetts
- Providence, Rhode Island
- Portsmouth, New Hampshire
- Newport, Rhode Island
- New
Haven, Connecticut
- Newburyport, Massachusetts
- Gloucester, Massachusetts
Educational
New England features four out of the eight historic Ivy League schools:
- Harvard
University in Cambridge
- Yale
University in New Haven
- Dartmouth
College in Hanover, New Hampshire
- Brown
University in Providence
The Five
Colleges are a consortium of five affiliated colleges in the
Pioneer Valley of
western
Massachusetts:
- Amherst
College in Amherst
- Hampshire
College in Amherst
- Mount
Holyoke College in South
Hadley
- Smith
College in Northampton
- University of Massachusetts Amherst in
Amherst
Recreational
The Appalachian Mountains run through northern New England
which make for excellent skiing. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine
are home to various ski resorts.
Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard in
Massachusetts are popular tourist destinations for their small town
charm and beaches. All have very restrictive zoning laws to prevent
rampant sprawl and overdevelopment.
Acadia National
Park, off the coast of Maine, preserves most of Mount Desert Island
and includes mountains, an ocean shoreline, woodlands, and lakes.
In Connecticut, Fairfield was ranked ninth, while Stamford was
ranked forty-sixth. In Rhode Island, Cranston was
ranked seventy-eighth, while Warwick was
ranked eighty-third.money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2006/top100/
See also
- Extreme points of New England
- Amusement parks in New England
- Beaches
of New England
- Boston
accent
- Boston
slang
These were other colonial dominions of the same scale and
influence in the U.S.
Northeast:
- New
Netherland and New
Sweden before New England and Pennsylvania ascended.
References
- Adams, James Truslow. Retrieved May 11, 2005
-
The Washington Post, Mass.
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