See subject. Not the most interesting party-game GQ, but there it is.
New England, of course, is a region, not a state. (And also a region within BSW.)
New Mexico is of course the only other US state. There are a lot of American cities named for European or other Old World ones, with or without the “New” tag attached.
In Canada, Nova Scotia is Latin for “New Scotland” and New Brunswick is an 18th century Anglicization for Braunschweig, Germany, a major possession of the House of Hanover.
New South Wales is obvious. Not so obvious is New Guinea, which reminded early shipborne explorers of the Guinea Coast in West Africa. PNG also includes New Caledonia, another island named for Scotland, and the New Hebrides, named after the Western Isles. New Zeakabd us named for the Netherlands province encompassing the Rhine Delta.
Correct, of course. Without checking back I had thought NH was included on his list in the OP.
Just looking at the place names on the coast between New York and Boston (both UK derived) I also see:
Port Chester, Stamford, Greenwich, Bridgeport, Stratford, Milford, New London, Bradford, Scarborough beach, Warwick, Newport, Bristol, Portsmouth, Tiverton, Dartmouth, New Bedford, Wareham, Falmouth, Barnstable, Chatham, Yarmouth, Harwich, Truro,Sandwich, Pymouth, Duxbury, Braintree, Weymouth.
I suspect there are many many more just in that area.
Hundreds and hundreds of place names refer to the Old Country. If it ain’t Old Country name, then it’s most likely American Indian. Just look at county names.
Does the old homeland have to be England? The city of Sebastopol, California was named after Sevastopol, Ukraine. Antioch, CA was named after the ancient Greek city. Dublin, CA was named after the Irish city.
And then there was a fad around 1750 to 1820 (approximately) to name places after ancient Greek and Roman cities or statesmen – in part to suggest links with the nascent American democracy/republic. (“Greek Revival” house and church building styles, and the severe classical style of Washington, DC’s major structures, also reflect this trend).
So, places which were mainly settled during this period, like western New York state and the earlier settlements along the Ohio River, are dotted with such names: Utica, Syracuse, Rome… The biggest example, I think, is Cincinnati.
ETA: This fits the OP in the extended sense of an “imagined homeland,” a place and time where one’s ideas were supposedly born.
Tons of 'em, as pointed out. I wass recently surprised by getting something about an event in Taunton. I assumed it was Taunton, Massachusetts. Not only because I live in Massachusetts, but because Taunton sounds kinda like Saugus (also in Massachusetts, and an Indian name). Turns out it was in Taunton in Somerset county in England. Surprise!
There are also some places that, while not named after somewhere in England, are named after someone whose surname derived from such a placename. Such as Washington.
A great number of cities in the Midwest and Plains states were named after notable cities in Europe in an attempt to boost interest in people moving there. For the last 30-some years, I’ve lived in lovely London Heights, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis with a remarkably prestigious name for a community without a post office that can’t even support a neighborhood market.
New London, CT
Cambridge, MA
Rome, NY
Suffolk and Norfolk counties, NY
Southampton, NY
You can’t take a stroll here in New England without running into a town named after somewhere in Old England.
New Rochelle, NY, named after La Rochelle, France.
Off the top of my head, there’s a New London near me, as well as a Manchester and Portsmouth. There are two Manchesters, actually - one in New Hampshire and one in Vermont. And Boston, of course.
A check of the US Census gazetteer shows Indiana has, among others:
Aberdeen, Albion, Alexandria, Bremen, Bristol, Cambridge City, Carthage, Chesterfield, Delphi, Dover Hill, Dublin, Dunkirk, Edinburgh, Geneva, Goshen, Hanover, Highland, Holland, Kent, London, Mecca, Mount Etna, New Albany, New Amsterdam, New Goshen, New Palestine, New Paris, New Salisbury, North Manchester, Notre Dame, Oxford, Rochester, Scotland, Somerset, Trafalgar, Troy, Versailles, Warsaw, Waterloo and Yorktown.
link: http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/docs/gazetteer/2010_place_list_18.txt
How “old” is “old country”? Memphis, TN is named after one of the oldest civilized places in the world.
Certainly not.
Baltimore, Maryland was named after Lord Baltimore, who was from Baltimore, Ireland, and Baltimore comes from the Irish for “town of the big house”.
The neighborhood of Harlem in NYC was originally a separate town in Dutch New Amsterdam named after the Dutch city of Haarlem.
New York has zillions of subdivisions. Counties are divided into towns, sometimes called townships, because small cities are also named towns. And small towns are named villages. Villages and towns lie inside of towns, and cities lie inside of counties (except for weird NYC). And dozens of towns and townships and villages and cities and counties were settled and named in exactly this period, although this period runs a bit later than you say. A huge influence on naming was the Greek War of Independence, which ran from 1821-1832 and was widely thought to be modeled on our Revolution. There’s more Greek here than in frat row.
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Incidentally, unlike American counties, counties in Britain are never referred to as “xxxx county” (although County Durham comes close to being an exception). If you do hear or see the phrase “xxxx county” in a British context (where xxxx is a county name) it is almost certainly either part of a reference to a local government body (such as Essex County Council) or a reference to a sports team based in that county, such as teh football team commonly known as Derby County (although the correct name of the county, in this case, is Derbyshire - oh, and the e in Derby is pronounced like the a in car).