A New England lament: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand in the 1940s

Ultimately, Newhall and Strand cast the region's spirit as the foundation for the nation, because it embodied both devotion to freedom and endurance. The pithy dedication to their book reads: "To the Spirit of New England, which lives in all that is free, noble, and courageous in America." Reiterating this high-minded sentiment, Strand claimed, "For here in this region, in these six states of the Union, were born many of the thoughts and actions that have shaped America for more than three hundred years." (43) Balibar's words are again useful, as he argues that the retrospective illusion of a national personality

  consists in believing that the generations which succeed one another
  over centuries on a reasonably stable territory, under a reasonably
  univocal designation, have handed down to each other an invariant
  substance. And it consists in believing that the process of
  development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as to see
  ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only one
  possible, that is, it represented a destiny. (44)

When the realization of that destiny is menaced by either internal decline or external threat, it may become even more imperative to insist on it by giving it narrative and institutional form. Indeed, with the outbreak of World War II, the idea that New England was the birthplace of democracy, its core the foundation of the nation, gained greater currency. (45) If anything, during the Cold War, New England's reputation as the fountainhead of American democracy and national character was reinforced with the establishment of museum villages as well as the emergence of Puritan Studies at Harvard University under the stewardship of Perry Miller. (46)

Time in New England adopts a dual perspective on New England's past to make sense of the loss of textile mills as well as other material artifacts and people from the region. On the one hand, the book's delineation of chronological history places the rise and success of the mills firmly in the historical past, at a distance in time from the present. The mills thereby become tokens of the region's once thriving textile industry and exemplify what made the region's economy unique and strong in the nineteenth century. Yet the role of the mills in the past is seen through the lens of the present. In highlighting the material state of decay and the abandonment of the mills in the mid-twentieth century, the photographs inevitably point to the distance separating the past and all of its accomplishments from the present. The book does not simply acknowledge loss, it presents loss as the essence of New England topography over time, while placing individual losses in historical perspective. At the same time, the textual excerpts propose that something, call it a spirit, still endures. In this scenario the mills may have thrived in the nineteenth century and may have become defunct in the twentieth century, but the words penned by people alive in the nineteenth century and reprinted on the modern page testify in the present to a core New England spirit, which has withstood material losses. Time in New England accepts the loss of the mills by situating their loss in the past, even as it insists that all is not lost. The book ultimately functions like a memorial, preserving the physical ruin of New England, its decayed body, together with the spirit of the dead in the present.