New England | |||
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Clockwise from top: skyline of Boston's financial district at night; a building of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; a view from Nubble Light on Cape Neddick in Maine; view from Mount Mansfield in Vermont; and a fisherman on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
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Motto: No official motto, but common de facto mottoes include "An appeal to Heaven" and "Nunquam libertas gratior extat" ("Nowhere does liberty appear in a more gracious form") | |||
Location of New England (red) in the United States |
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Composition | |||
Largest metropolitan area | |||
Largest city | Boston | ||
Area | |||
• Total | 71,991.8 sq mi (186,458 km2) | ||
• Land | 62,688.4 sq mi (162,362 km2) | ||
Population (2015 est.) | |||
• Total | 14,727,584 | ||
• Density | 234.9/sq mi (90.7/km2) | ||
Demonym(s) | New Englander, Yankee | ||
GDP (nominal) | |||
• Total | $953.9 billion (2015) | ||
Dialects | New England English, New England French |
New England is a geographical region comprising six states of the northeast United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and south, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north, respectively. The Atlantic Ocean is to the east and southeast, and Long Island Sound is to the south. Boston is its largest city. Its largest metropolitan area is Greater Boston, which also includes Worcester (the second-largest city in New England), Manchester (the largest city in New Hampshire), and Providence (the capital and largest city of Rhode Island), with nearly a third of the entire region's population.
Puritan Separatist Pilgrims from England first settled in the region in 1620, forming the Plymouth Colony, the second successful English settlement in the Americas, following the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia founded in 1607. Ten years later, more Puritans settled north of Plymouth Colony in Boston, thus forming Massachusetts Bay Colony. Over the next 126 years, people in the region fought in four French and Indian Wars, until the British and their Iroquois allies defeated the French and their Algonquin allies in North America. In 1692, the town of Salem, Massachusetts and surrounding areas experienced one of the most infamous cases of mass hysteria in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the Salem witch trials.