Long before the English arrived, Indigenous peoples inhabited the region. These included the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett, Pequot, Mohegan, Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Massachusett, for whom the state is named. They cultivated crops, gathered food, fished, hunted, and sustained their communities through deep knowledge of the local land, water, weather, plants, and seasons.

In 1614, English explorer John Smith explored the coast from Cape Cod toward Maine and, two years later, published his observations in a book, A Description of New England, giving the region its name in honor of his king and country. Six years later, the Pilgrims arrived—a group of English Separatists seeking religious freedom in the New World. They left England aboard the famous ship, Mayflower. In 1620, 102 passengers anchored at the tip of Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts Bay before establishing Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English settlement in the region. These settlers received guidance from the Wampanoag people to help them adapt to their new environment. This cooperation, described in accounts by the colony’s governor, has long inspired the American Thanksgiving tradition.

Within two decades after the first landing, the population grew from 102 settlers to roughly 20,000 due to continued migration from England. For the rest of the 17th century, the Puritan foothold expanded with the establishment of additional colonies such as Providence Plantations, Connecticut Colony, and New Hampshire Colony. The Puritans established the first school system in America. As settlers spread across more land, their expansion led to violent clashes with Native tribes and neighboring European colonists, such as the French in Canada and the Dutch in New Amsterdam. The New England colonies were one of the four English colonial regions in North America others being: the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. By the mid-1700s, while British by birth, New England had begun to cultivate an identity of its own. .