The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #164097 Message #3923228
Posted By: keberoxu
09-May-18 - 05:18 PM
Thread Name: BS: Are there any English-Americans?
Subject: RE: BS: Are there any English-Americans?
Consider, for a start, that
one region of the continental US calls itself
"New England."
Mudcatter mg is quite right about Canada;
the Royalists streaming out of "New England"
and heading north, over the border;
the parts of Quebec, for example,
which in a few spots have a heritage as much English as French,
villages near the US-Canada border where
the former New-Englanders went to ground.
"New England" is actually a complicated state of affairs.
There is all that business of religious persecution, for one thing.
You had the eastern Massachusetts bunch,
very strict Congregationalists,
and highly intolerant of, for example, Catholics.
Then comes the area now known as Rhode Island,
which in itself has layers of contradiction;
for even though Rhode Island is remembered for
the excesses of the Gilded Age and the industrialists,
long before then it was a place of religious tolerance,
where such as Roger Williams could worship as he saw fit
without the persecution he would have experienced in the Boston area.
It is something of a literary cliche that there are
families who know the names of the ships from which
their ancestors left England for New England.
This does not even take into account
the waves of immigration for countries other than England:
worker migrations, to work in the mills, the quarries, the factories.