Harvard and Yale described New England in its earliest days. They and other Ivy Leagues started as religious institutions just as the earliest universities in Europe started with the patronage of the Catholic Church, whatever the sentiments of the faculty centuries later. I always thought the Civil War hero, Joshua Chamberlain, was the quintessential Yankee, par none. As the tale goes: In his early teens he was stuck with horse and wagon on one side of the river. His impatient father said to get to the other side. "How?" cried the boy. "I don't care," growled dad, "Just DO it." 
So little Joshua did it. Yankees had a reputation for practical invention and for getting things done without b.s. It's not for nothing that Edison described genius as 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. His contemporary and sometime rival, Nicola Tesla, son of Serbian peasant clergy, reversed those percentages to explain his own inventions.  
Chamberlain's idealism, the physical courage so startling and unexpected when one considers his mentality and pre-war intellectual life-style, the tendency to see life as a struggle towards the light, towards something higher, are all . It's not for nothing that the Utopian movements emanated from New England. I know of none that came from the South or mid-Atlantic. 
For Chamberlain, war veteran get togethers were transcendental experiences. He used that term some 50 years before the 1960s counter culture made it famous. 
But I'm not sure about the U.S. becoming the new New England. Too many Yankee inventions are made in China. To really manifest his powers, a Yankee must DO it himself.