By American standards, Connecticut is a very old place. The descendants of many of its original Puritan settlers still live here, and in their names--Hale, Baldwin, Trumbull, Bulkeley--the spirit of Thomas Hooker still seems to cast a shadow. From its beginnings, caution and conservatism have shaped the Connecticut character and have made its nickname, "The Land of Steady Habits," truly descriptive of life here.

Yet not everyone in Connecticut shares either that ancestry or that disposition. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of decidedly different backgrounds and outlooks joined the scions of old Puritans and Yankees to enrich--and to complicate--the state's history. Though endowed by nature and the shapers of boundaries with few resources and little space, the people of Connecticut from colonial times to the present have distinguished themselves as enthusiastic and talented purveyors to the rest of the nation of a vast array of goods and services. In the process, they have secured for themselves a degree of economic eminence shared by few other places, and they have proven that there is substance in the old idea of "Yankee inventiveness."