Bluford Adams. Old and New New Englanders: Immigration and Regional Identity in the Gilded Age.

Abstract

Immigration issues in late-nineteenth-century New England have not received the scholarly attention they merit. In collective memory, immigrant experiences summoned up by Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Lower East Side, and Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) remain undeniably central to the formation of national identity. To many historians and scholars, the patterns of diverse ethnic immigration into Chicago and into the American West have seemed equally exemplary. Immigration into the South and into New England, which virtually defined the nation during the colonial and antebellum periods, has seemed far less important. Underlying such preference is the fact that, during the later nineteenth century, industrial and political power moved from New York and the Middle Atlantic states through the Midwest and on to the Pacific. In historical memory, the South and New England have therefore been seen as regions in comparative decline, no longer representative of the national power that was to emerge during the Progressive Era and beyond.