Compared to other regions, New England endured well into the nineteenth century as the most culturally homogeneous corner of the United States. The region's population had grown primarily from the fertility of its original settlers between 1620 and 1640 and their descendants. Colonial New England experienced relatively little in-migration. All of this began to change with the arrival of Irish immigrants by the shipload, especially in the 1840s. In the decades after the Civil War, tens of thousands of French Canadians, followed by Italians, Portuguese, Poles, and many other smaller groups, inundated New England. By the turn of the century, New England was well on its way toward becoming the country's most Roman Catholic region and its most culturally diverse within the context of European and French Canadian nationalities. Bluford Adams's book constitutes a highly original analysis of New England's transformation. His work far surpasses Barbara Solomon's Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (1956), long the foundational study of the region's ethnic and religious upheaval.

To begin with, Adams presents a more complex and balanced view of Yankee New Englanders. He divides the native-born into Anglo-Saxon racialists who were alarmed over the trajectory of a world they beheld as their possession; Americanizers, some of whom were optimistic that the newcomers could be assimilated into New England culture over time; and liberals, “who took a more welcoming and sometimes egalitarian view of the foreign born” (7). In Adams's hands, the history of New England identity – the region as an imagined territory – emerges as a contested terrain. Immigrants were not always indifferent to regional identity. Nor, Adams argues, were they simply passive subjects in the face of Americanizing efforts in public schools and settlement houses. Immigrants sometimes challenged the native-born over New England's meaning. An Irish Historical Society, for example, traced the presence of their countrymen, albeit in small numbers, back through the colonial era. They represented the Irish as the new Pilgrims, appropriating the Yankees' dominant narrative of New England's founding. Buoyed by the burgeoning Quebecois population in mill cities from Maine to Rhode Island, some French Canadian leaders envisioned “reconquering” New England, part of which had been claimed by Canada.

In a chapter focussing on the “regional body,” Adams offers a provocative, up-to-date analysis of gender and its relation to the native-born, immigrants, and New England identity. Among other things, he points out that during the Gilded Age, New England Yankees had the lowest birthrate of any ethnic group in the country, which fueled fears of “race suicide.” Prominent physicians blamed middle- and upper-class women, who too often resorted to birth control and abortion while immigrant mothers typically gave birth to many children. Yankee women's physical “delicacy” proved a double-edged sword. It shaped the moral and physical refinement that underpinned notions of Victorian womanhood. But it also suggested the physical deficiencies of Yankee women compared to their colonial ancestors and even to contemporary immigrant women who endured the rigors of childbirth and often simultaneously worked in the mills.

Adams devotes chapters to the role of immigrants in rural New England, which many outsiders saw in the throes of a decades-long decline, and to the “Greater New England” of the Old Northwest, where thousands of Yankees had migrated during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these chapters breaks new ground. Immigrants in rural New England are a neglected topic. Adams weaves their presence as farm owners and laborers into a broad discussion between “progressives” and “traditionalists” over the revitalization of rural New England. The former tended to accept immigrants more readily than did the latter, who remained hidebound toward farming and newcomers. Among the Yankee descendants in the Old Northwest, Adams delineates three groups: nativists like the racialists in New England; Mid-west “preservationists” of Yankee culture in their own region; and “nationalists,” who saw their region as a model for the nation.

Some readers may wish Adams were clearer about the size and influence of the groups around which he organizes each of his five chapters. Still, his deeply researched and well-written book constitutes a major contribution to American and regional studies. His discussions of immigrant agency, gender, rural New England, and the emergent identity of the Mid-west enrich our understanding of newcomers versus ancestors. Solomon's book remains valuable. But we now have a study that conceptually and geographically moves far beyond where she left the story.