Editing Yankee (section)

==Yankee nationality==

===Yankee settlement in the United States===
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The original Yankees diffused widely across the northern United States, leaving their imprints in New York, the [[Upper Midwest]], many taking advantage of water routes by the [[Great Lakes]], and places as far away as [[Seattle]], [[San Francisco]], and [[Honolulu]].<ref>Mathews (1909), Holbrook (1950)</ref>

<blockquote>Yankeeism is the general character of the Union. Yankee manners are as migratory as Yankee men. The latter are found everywhere and the former prevail wherever the latter are found. Although the genuine Yankee belongs to New England, the term "Yankee" is now as appropriate to the natives of the Union at large.<ref name="thomascolleygrattan">{{cite book |title=Civilized America ... Second edition, Volume 1|author=Thomas Colley Grattan|publisher=Bradbury&Evans|year=1859|pages=7}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Yankees settled other states in various ways: some joined highly organized colonization companies, others purchased groups of land together; some joined volunteer land settlement groups, and self-reliant individual families also migrated.<ref name="thomascolleygrattan" /> Yankees typically lived in villages consisting of clusters of separate farms.  Often they were merchants, bankers, teachers, or professionals.<ref>{{cite book|author=Kenneth J. Winkle|title=The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JcEVAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78|year=2001|publisher=Taylor |page=78|isbn=9781461734369}}</ref><ref name="susanegray">{{cite book |title= The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier|author=Susan E. Gray|publisher=Univ of North Carolina Press|year=1996|pages=11}}</ref>

Village life fostered local democracy, best exemplified by the open [[town meeting]] form of government that still exists today in New England. Village life also stimulated mutual oversight of moral behavior and emphasized civic virtue. The Yankees built international trade routes stretching to China by 1800 from the New England seaports of [[Boston]], [[Salem, Massachusetts|Salem]], [[Providence, Rhode Island|Providence]], [[Newport, Rhode Island|Newport]], and [[New London, Connecticut|New London]], among others. Much of the profit from trading was reinvested in the textile and machine tools industries.<ref>Knights (1991)</ref>

===Yankee politics===
After 1800, Yankees spearheaded most American reform movements, including those for the abolition of slavery, temperance in use of alcohol, increase in women's political rights, and improvement in women's education. [[Emma Willard]] and [[Mary Lyon]] pioneered in the higher education of women, while Yankees comprised most of the reformers who went South during [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] in the late 1860s to educate the [[Freedman|Freedmen]].<ref>Taylor (1979)</ref>

Historian John Buenker has examined the worldview of the Yankee settlers in the Midwest:
[[File:Old State House and State Street, Boston 1801.jpg|thumb|200px|[[Boston]], [[New England]] capital]]
<blockquote>Because they arrived first and had a strong sense of community and mission, Yankees were able to transplant New England institutions, values, and mores, altered only by the conditions of frontier life.  They established a public culture that emphasized the work ethic, the sanctity of private property, individual responsibility, faith in residential and social mobility, practicality, piety, public order and decorum, reverence for public education, activists, honest, and frugal government, town meeting democracy, and he believed that there was a public interest that transcends particular and stock ambitions.  Regarding themselves as the elect and just in a world rife with sin and corruption, they felt a strong moral obligation to define and enforce standards of community and personal behavior….  This pietistic worldview was substantially shared by British, Scandinavian, Swiss, English-Canadian and Dutch Reformed immigrants, as well as by German Protestants and many of the [[Forty-Eighters]].<ref>{{cite book |contribution=Wisconsin |author-first=John |author-last=Buenker |editor-first=James H. |editor-last=Madison |editor-link1=James H. Madison |title=Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TMUCo0UXCjoC&pg=PA72 |year=1988 |publisher=Indiana University Press |pages=72–73 |isbn=0253314232}}</ref></blockquote>
Yankees dominated New England, much of upstate New York, and much of the upper Midwest, and were the strongest supporters of the new Republican party in the 1860s. This was especially true for the [[Congregationalists]], [[Presbyterianism|Presbyterians]], and Methodists among them. A study of 65 predominantly Yankee counties showed that they voted only 40 percent for the [[Whig Party (United States)|Whigs]] in 1848 and 1852, but became 61–65 percent [[History of the Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] in presidential elections of 1856 through 1864.<ref>Kleppner p 55</ref>

[[Ivy League]] universities remained bastions of old Yankee culture until well after [[World War II]], particularly [[History of Harvard University|Harvard]] and [[Yale University|Yale]].

===Yankee stereotypes===
[[File:President Calvin Coolidge.jpg|thumb|200px|President [[Calvin Coolidge]] of New England]]
President [[Calvin Coolidge]] exemplified the modern Yankee stereotype. Coolidge moved from rural [[Vermont]] to urban [[Massachusetts]] and was educated at elite [[Amherst College]]. Yet his flint-faced, unprepossessing ways and terse rural speech proved politically attractive. "That Yankee twang will be worth a hundred thousand votes", explained one Republican leader.<ref>William Allen White, ''A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge'' (1938) p. 122.</ref> Coolidge's laconic ways and dry humor were characteristic of stereotypical rural "Yankee humor" at the turn of the 20th century.<ref>Arthur George Crandall, [https://books.google.com/books?id=AhXdAf0lBqwC&dq=%22new+england+joke+lore%22&pg=PA13 ''New England Joke Lore: The Tonic of Yankee Humor''], (F.A. Davis Company, 1922).</ref>

[[Yankee ingenuity]] was a worldwide stereotype of inventiveness, technical solutions to practical problems, "know-how," self-reliance, and individual enterprise.<ref>Eugene S. Ferguson, "On the Origin and Development of American Mechanical 'know-how'", ''American Studies'' 3.2 (1962): 3–16. [https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/2075/2034 online]</ref> The stereotype first appeared in the 19th century. As Mitchell Wilson notes, "Yankee ingenuity and Yankee git-up-and-go did not exist in colonial days."<ref>quoted in Reynold M. Wik, "Some interpretations of the mechanization of agriculture in the Far West." ''Agricultural History'' (1975): 73–83. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3742110 in JSTOR]</ref> The great majority of Yankees gravitated toward the burgeoning cities of the northeast, while wealthy New Englanders also sent ambassadors to frontier communities where they became influential bankers and newspaper printers. They introduced the term "Universal Yankee Nation" to proselytize their hopes for national and global influence.<ref>Susan E. Gray, ''The Yankee West: community life on the Michigan frontier'' (1996) p. 3</ref>

===Religion===
New England Yankees originally followed the [[Puritan]] tradition, as expressed in [[Congregationalism in the United States#17th century|Congregational]] and [[Baptists in the United States#17th century|Baptist]] churches. Beginning in the late colonial period, many became [[Presbyterian Church in the United States of America#Colonial era|Presbyterians]], [[Episcopal Church (United States)|Episcopalians]], [[Methodism|Methodists]], or, later, [[Unitarianism|Unitarians]]. Strait-laced 17th-century moralism as derided by novelist [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] faded in the 18th century. The [[First Great Awakening]] under [[Jonathan Edwards (theologian)|Jonathan Edwards]] and others in the mid-18th century, and the [[Second Great Awakening]] in the early 19th century under [[Charles Grandison Finney]] and others emphasized personal piety, revivals, and devotion to civic duty.