Moralism and ward politics

"'All politics is local,' Massachusetts {U.S.} Representative and House Speaker Tip O'Neil famously announced. In much of the region, traditional New England moralism merged with competitive ethnic ward politics to shape regional political culture, an often fragile synthesis that went asunder, for instance, when Senator Ted Kennedy was spat upon in South Boston during the busing turmoil of the early 1970s.

"Perhaps the sustained immigration of recent decades and the current revival of interest in the study of regionalism will encourage advocates of a new regional studies to revise standard narratives of New England's distinctive past....We need a new narrative of how New England developed not only as a Puritan-Yankee city on a hill but also as an ethnic city by the mill.''

-- From Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity From the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century, by Joseph A. Conforti.