social studies help ?

why? It's called colonization.

If you google the colonial history of America you'll find your answer.

nostalgia mostly, sometimes in an effort to honour their birth country.
Far from home and deprived of even rudimentary trappings of civilised life colonists often named unfamiliar areas after their originating country. Sometimes the topography reminded them of the place they grew up.

Australia has its own New England.

Australia is a country of plagiarists!

All of Australia is New England. (Well, except for New South Wales.)

New England was an informal name--it was usually applied to the set of provinces already existent when Charles Stuart, King Charles II, became King in 1660. Some explanation is necessary, but i'll try to keep the extraneous detail to a minimum. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, the English had already claimed the Atlantic coast of North America. With no serious competition (the Indians didn't count as far as they were concerned), they felt free to set up colonies. The first was on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina in 1584. When the ships which had brought the colonist went back to England, they became caught up in the preparations to meet the Spanish Armada (1588), and they didn't get back to their colony until about 1590. Everyone was gone. There's a whole story there, but i'll let that go.

The entire English claim was called Virginia, because Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen. The next attempt at a colony, however, took place after she died in 1603. She was succeeded by her cousin, King James of Scotland, and the new colony was named Jamestown in his honor.

Technically, the entire coast all the way to Newfoundland in what is now Canada was Virginia. But in the early 1600s, individual settlers began setting up shop (way before all that Pilgrim Fathers bullshit), like Samuel Maverick who built a house and founded a village on the shore of what is now Salem, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Bay looked promising, and more so because people were unhappy over religion in England. James I was succeeded by his pig-headed son, Charles I in 1625. Charles got off to a good start by getting in a bitch fight with Parliament, so he prorogued Parliament, which means he sent them home and ruled without a Parliament. That was in 1628. The people called Puritans (who were English Calvinists and who had been in business since the days of Queen Elizabeth) wanted to get out of Dodge, so they got a charter from the King to set up the Massachusetts Bay Company--it was a corporate venture, not a colony. As things in England went from bad to worse, in 1630, John Winthrop went to Massachusetts taking the charter with him. This was way more important than that Pilgrim Fathers bullshit, but i won't go into details here.

It's enough to know that there were now two growing English colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America south of Newfoundland (where another colony was set up in 1610)--that was Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown. Charles I kept squabbling in a really shabby way with the Puritans and the dissenters (religious whack jobs who were not Church of England or Puritans), and then picked a fight with the Scots (see the Bishops War) who handed him his ass, militarily speaking. Now Charles was really in the ****, so he had to call Parliament back in an attempt to get money to pay for an army to teach those damned Scots a lesson. That was the Long Parliament of 1640, and that went down the tubes so fast if made Charles' head swim. The English then proceeded to fight three civil wars, and between English Civil War II and Son of English Civil War II, they cut off Charles' head (January, 1649).

His son Charley wandered around Europe for the next 11 years, embarrassing all the Kings and Queens who thought something should be done for him, but who didn't want to pay his bills. Massachusetts and Virginia (which is what the Jamestown colony was now being called) were left to their own devices. The Puritans in Massachusetts were real fanatics, so Roger Williams got out of Dodge and set up a colony now called Rhode Island for people who couldn't stomach John Winthrop and his Too Live Puritan Crew. More Puritans branched out and set up a colony in the valley of the Connecticut River. Many of the fishermen and sailors from England weren't exactly thrilled with the Puritans either, and they set up a colony to the north of Massachusetts Bay which was called New Hampshire, named after a county in England.

Leaving aside the story of how, in 1660 Charles Stuart, son of the executed King Charles I, was welcomed back to England and became King Charles II: Rhode Island was Johnny on the spot, and got a royal charter (for some cold, hard cash--Charles was chronically broke) to elect their own governor. Massachusetts tried to brazen it out, with their charter, but Parliament was no longer Puritan, and in no mood for their bullshit, so their charter was revoked. The left some small colonies, none of which had a Governor. So, a single governor was appointed, and the little group of colonies became known as New England. Ta-da ! ! !

New Spain and New France (and New Holland) are all easier. In 1519, Cortés landed on the coast of what we call Mexico, and then fought a two year war to put the Aztecs out of business (he could never have done it if all the other Indians hadn't hated the Aztecs, too--they helped him out . . . big mistake). He named the new colony New Spain, for what ought to be obvious reasons. The best short book on this is The Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz, who was there for the party.

Same same with Canada, which was originally French. Jacques Cartier explored the region in the early 16th Century (1500s), and in 1608, Samuel de Champlain set up a colony at what is now Québec city, and, showing a distinct lack of imagination, called his colony New France. Same basic story with the Dutch, who set up where New York is now, and showing the same lack of imagination, called their colony New Holland.

Any questions?

New England will always be the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and some parts of Connecticut, (the enclave of New York Yankees fans isn't a part of New England! )

actually..... New Holland.

New York was originally named New Amsterdam.

Betcha don't know why they changed the name to New York, and why some of the territory was renamed New Jersey.

OK, OK . . . i'll end the intense suspense. At the end of the last Anglo-Dutch war, New Amsterdam was captured by the English, and the commander was the brother of King Charles II--James, Duke of York. Part of the territory was renamed New Jersey and some of the land given to supporters who had recognized him as King in 1649 after his father was beheaded. At the time he was living on the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, near France. So he repaid his debt to those supporters by renaming the territory New Jersey, and giving them land grants there. Charles paid off a lot of his debts that way, like giving a huge territory to William Penn, whose father had loaned him a huge hunk of cash, which he was unable to repay. So he gave them Pennsylvania. Didn't cost him a dime.

Well, e.g. Albany, NY, got its name from James as well - his Scottish title was Duke of Albany ...

Fordham University has some nice maps of Nova Belgica /Anglia Nova

My father was a graduate of Fordham, and Fordham Law . . . i don't trust 'em . . .

I figured it was something like this for Noo Yawk. I don't know much about Noo Joisey.

There was also New Sweden - same reason as New England - a colony