News Releases

University of Southern Maine Professor Busts New England’s Thanksgiving and Christmas Holiday Myths

November 9, 2007

Nationwide, the images depicting Thanksgiving are of Pilgrims feasting with Native Americans, pumpkins, and orange leaves. Snowy Christmas displays will soon follow. Thanksgiving and Christmas both are quintessential New England holidays -- odd because the Pilgrims didn’t celebrate Christmas.  Since Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, the image of Pilgrims and Native Americans feasting together has been a cherished icon. Likewise, Currier and Ives prints of Christmas sleigh rides in New England represent the perfect holiday in the minds of many Americans. But, like most New England icons, these images don’t tell the whole truth, according to Joseph Conforti, professor of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine.

Conforti’s book “Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century,” published by the University of North Carolina Press, traces the development of New England’s cultural identity across the centuries from Pilgrims to Yankee Magazine. The icons that represent New England to most Americans and the rest of the world are in Conforti's view, cultural artifacts that obscure the historical reality of the region. A native and lifelong resident of New England, he says, “much of my own experience as a New Englander has defied the dominant narratives of regional identity.”

A powerful collective identity was developed by the generations that succeeded the Puritans, Conforti says, and this identity helped shape America’s views of New England. While New England states became urban, melting pots of immigrants, the rest of the country still saw the region as the pastoral homeland. Conforti himself grew up in an ethnic New England. “Fabled Plymouth,” as he calls it, was only 45 minutes away from the gritty urban life of his native Fall River with its factories and immigrant workers, but he says, although “Thanksgiving acquired a special aura,” he felt that “the real New England seemed at once geographically proximate and culturally remote.”
As a scholar of New England, he came to understand that the narratives of New England, built around such icons as the Puritan forefathers, white clapboard churches and Yankee farmers, “rested on inclusions and exclusions from the regional past.” He describes how as southern parts of New England became more diversified by waves of immigration, and more industrialized, that reality simply forced the heartland of the “imagined” New England north. The more homogeneous populations and rural character of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have made these states the “true” New England of today.

Conforti teaches classes about the regional identities of both New England and the American West in USM’s graduate program in American and New England Studies.  He was named USM’s 2007-2008 Distinguished Professor, the highest honor accorded to a USM professor. Conforti, who is frequently quoted in the media on aspects of New England history and culture from holiday celebrations to the Red Sox, is the author of two earlier books on New England religion, and the more recent “Jonathan Edwards, Religion Tradition and American Culture” (2005). He is the editor of a volume of essays, “Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England” (2005).

For help arranging interviews with Conforti, please call Judie Alessi O’Malley or Bob Caswell at USM Public Affairs at 207-780-4200.  They also can be reached at home at 207-839-6402 (O’Malley), or 207-839-2026 (Caswell).

The University of Southern Maine is the comprehensive metropolitan university in Maine, serving some 10,400 students with campuses in Portland, Gorham and Lewiston-Auburn.  Founded in 1878, USM is a member of the University of Maine System, and currently offers over 50 majors and more than 40 academic programs.  For more information, see: http://www.usm.maine.edu.

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