What was the lifestyle in the New England colonies?

In the New England colonies families often kept small farms to provide food for themselves. All the members of each family shared in the work. The men planted crops, built fences, and butchered livestock. They also often hunted and fished to feed their families.

What was life like living in the New England colonies?

Colonists in New England faced many hardships, including long, cold winters that left many sick. Mostly, people farmed small plots of land and worked to store enough food for winter. Colonists didn't have many luxuries, but for the Puritans, a simple life was what they wanted.

What was life like in the English colonies?

Much of colonial life was hard work, even preparing food. But colonists found ways to mix work with play. They also enjoyed sports and games. For most of the 1700s, the colonists were content to be ruled by English laws.

What was life like for colonial woman in New England?

Most colonial women were homemakers who cooked meals, made clothing, and doctored their family as well as cleaned, made household goods to use and sell, took care of their animals, maintained a cook fire and tended the kitchen gardens.

What was life like in the new Middle colonies?

The Middle colonies had a mild climate with warm summers. The land was better for farming than in the New England colonies. The region produced enough wheat, corn (maize), and other grains to feed the colonies, with plenty left to export to England. The colonists also built mills to grind the grain into flour.

Everyday Life in Colonial America

What are some fun facts about the New England colonies?

What were the New England colonies known for?

The New England colonies had rocky soil, which was not suited to plantation farming, so the New England colonies depended on fishing, lumbering, and subsistence farming. The Middle colonies also featured mixed economies, including farming and merchant shipping.

What was life like for slaves in the New England colonies?

In New England, enslaved people usually lived alone or at most, with one or two others, often with the family inside their home. The person probably worked on a small farm as a domestic slave, or perhaps held a trade in an urban area like Boston.

What were the gender roles in the New England colonies?

Family life in Puritan society revolved around the nuclear family, with husbands as the heads of households and wives expected to be obedient and submissive. The primary role of women was seen as childbearing and raising children. Large families were common, and women often bore many children.

What was life like for girls in Puritan America?

The Puritans, like many societies in this time period, believed that women were culturally inferior to men. Married women were expected to follow the edicts of their husbands and were unable to interact with local government on their own.

What did people do for fun in the New England colonies?

Colonial life was filled with work, but it wasn't always hard or boring. Early Americans knew how to turn work into fun by singing or telling stories, having contests, or working together in spinning or quilting bees. Some liked to dance to fiddle and fife music.

Why was life expectancy so low in colonial New England?

Most of the differences in life expectancy between colonial Americans and Americans of today are due to the much higher rate of infant and child mortality in the past. Adults in colonial New England often could anticipate lives almost as long as each one of us today—especially if they were male.

What was life like in the colonies for kids?

Children were expected to help with a share of the family's work. Boys helped their fathers and girls did chores at home. By a time a girl was four she could knit stockings! Even with all the work they did, colonial children still found time to have fun.

What was the life span of the New England colonies?

Men and women, on average, lived about 65 to 70 years, 15 to 20 years longer than in England. One result was that seventeenth-century New England was the first society in history in which grandparents were common.

What did the New England colonies eat?

Now colonists ate a remarkably rich and varied diet of European and American grains and vegetables. They had livestock, poultry and wild game, as well as exotic foods like chocolate, rum, spices and sugar from the West Indies and tea and spices from East Asia.

Why live in the New England colonies?

The New England colonies were a place to settle down, whether seeking religious freedom, diverse cultures, or even a not so agricultural labor system. Religions such as Protestantism, Catholicism, Puritanism, and the practice of Jews and Quakers were all allowed in the area of Rhode Island.

Did the New England colonies have slaves?

Although New England would later become known for its abolitionist leaders and its role in helping formerly enslaved Southern blacks and those escaping slavery, the colonies had a history of using enslaved and indentured labor to create and build their economies.

What was the Puritan lifestyle like in New England?

The Puritans were an industrious people, and virtually everything within the house was made by hand - including clothes. The men and boys took charge of farming, fixing things around the house, and caring for livestock. The women made soap, cooked, gardened, and took care of the house.

What was the religion in the New England colonies?

Religion. The New England colonies were dominated by the Puritans, reformers seeking to "purify" Christianity, who came over from England to practice religion without persecution. Puritans followed strict rules and were intolerant of other religions, eventually absorbing the separatist Pilgrims in Massachusetts by 1629 ...

How did New England treat slaves?

People were beaten and tortured in the North, just like they were beaten and tortured in the South, and it was just bad in different ways.” New England couldn't sustain as many large plantation-style farms as the South, so most white slaveholders in the North held one or two enslaved people.

Why did New England not have slaves?

Lacking large-scale plantations, New England did not have the same level of demand for slave labor as the South.

Did New England colonies grow tobacco?

Tobacco brought the colonists a large source of revenue that was used to pay taxes and fines, purchase slaves, and to purchase manufactured goods from England. As the colonies grew, so did their production of tobacco. Slaves and indentured servants were brought into the colonies to participate in tobacco farming.

What problems did the New England colonies face?

The European colonists who settled New England and other areas in the Americas both carried and experienced a wide variety of diseases: smallpox, malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, influenza, pleurisy, colds, whooping cough, mumps, measles, typhus, typhoid fever, hookworms, parasites, ...

What was the economy like in the New England colonies for kids?

Economy. In the 1600s the economy of New England revolved around farming, fishing, and whaling. However, shipbuilding and sea commerce soon became an important economic activity.

What religion is Puritans?

Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans were English Protestants who believed that the reforms of the Church of England did not go far enough. In their view, the liturgy was still too Catholic. Bishops lived like princes. Ecclesiastical courts were corrupt.