Boston, Massachusetts

Boston, the capital of Massachusetts, is one of the United States' oldest and most historic cities—one that has played a major role in US history since early colonial days.

Bostonians, proud of their city's wealth and accomplishments, have nicknamed it the Hub of the Universe, or simply the Hub, seeing it as the center around which all other things revolve. The city was also once known as the Athens of America for its role in promoting culture and education.

The county seat of Suffolk County, Boston is the largest city in Massachusetts as well as in New England.

Originally the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Boston was founded by English Puritans who sought religious freedom. The new community was named for the city of Boston in Lancashire, England. The colony soon became a prosperous seaport as well as a center of education. (Boston Latin, founded in 1635, was the nation's first free public school, and Harvard University, founded shortly afterward, was its first institution of higher learning.) Boston played a major role in gaining American independence from Britain and was the site of such historic events as the Boston Massacre (1770) and the Boston Tea Party (1773).

The city is also one of the nation's most important financial and commercial centers. Boston has been a major seaport and immigration point of entry since early in its history. Its connection to naval history is recalled by the eighteenth-century warship USS Constitution (also known as Old Ironsides), docked at the former Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Boston sea captains made immense fortunes. The city was also an early center for the Industrial Revolution, with factories dotting the landscape. Boston is still a major manufacturing center, especially in high technology. The corridor along Route 128, the state highway that loops around Boston, is home to many major high-tech firms. Boston also remains a leading educational center with numerous institutions of higher learning, including Boston College and Boston University.

The city on the Charles River has made major contributions to American culture. Many well-known writers, scholars, and artists are Boston natives. In addition to the universities and colleges, important cultural institutions include the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Faneuil Hall Marketplace, in the heart of downtown, is a major tourist attraction, as is the nearby colonial State House. Other attractions include Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and the central Boston Common.

Landscape

Boston lies on a peninsula next to the Charles River, which flows out into Massachusetts Bay. This proximity to the water has greatly affected the city's history and economy and also provides residents with many different recreational activities.

The city has gradually increased its size through landfill and annexation. During the nineteenth century, the city took over surrounding communities such as Roxbury and Dorchester.

One of the first things noticeable about Boston is the very European character of its streets. Cities such as New York and Philadelphia are built on a grid pattern; Boston's streets, however, are often narrow and meandering. According to legend, some of these were former cowpaths that gradually became roads. Out-of-town visitors often find it difficult to find their way through the city. Fortunately, Boston has an extensive system of public transit. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) operates buses, subway service, and commuter trains throughout the city.

In the 2000s, Boston underwent one of the world's largest transportation projects: the so-called Big Dig. This project, which faced huge cost overruns, relocated the city's main highways underground to reclaim the land formerly beneath highway overpasses and accommodate the increasing amount of automobile traffic in the city.

Much of Boston resembles any other large American city, with tall skyscrapers in the financial/commercial district, but much still remains of the city's architectural heritage. Beacon Hill, for example, retains many fine examples of nineteenth-century Federalist and Victorian architecture.

People

In 2022, the US Census Bureau estimated the population of Boston at 650,706 residents. The population of Greater Boston, including the northern, western, and southern suburbs, numbers in the millions. A plurality of Boston's population is white (48.6 percent), with large Black or African American (22.5 percent), Hispanic or Latino (19.6 percent), Asian (9.7 percent), and multiracial (12 percent) minorities.

It is hard to overestimate Boston's influence on American life, both past and present. The city has produced untold numbers of leaders and trendsetters, from Revolutionary statesmen such as John Hancock to literary figures such as Louisa May Alcott. Other famous creative figures from Boston include painters John Singleton Copley and Winslow Homer, authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Everett Hale, and Edgar Allen Poe, and actors Jack Lemmon and Matt Damon.

Originally, Boston's population was largely of English stock. The Irish population swelled in the early nineteenth century, due to the Great Potato Famine and generally hard conditions at home. By the end of the nineteenth century, Boston had also gained large immigrant populations from southern and eastern Europe. These groups vied for power with the old-time "Yankee" or "Brahmin" elite. John F. Kennedy's victory over Henry Cabot Lodge for a US Senate seat in the 1950s represented the immigrants' triumph over the Brahmins. The city remains a major entry point for immigrants, many of whom are students at area colleges and universities.

Economy

Boston has a large and diversified economy, based on high technology, higher education, health care, finance, tourism, government, and the trade, transportation, and utilities sector. The Route 128 high-technology corridor suffered a severe blow when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, but the region is still home to many healthy companies. Tourism has long been a major industry, but it received a large boost from the American Bicentennial in 1976. As of 2021, the area's major employers were in health care and social assistance; professional, scientific, and technical services; finance and insurance; government; and education.

The city's major daily newspapers are the Boston Globe and Boston Herald. Specialized publications include the Boston Business Journal. Boston is one of the nation's most important broadcast markets, with affiliates of all three major television networks as well as various syndicated stations. WGBH, the flagship station for Massachusetts public broadcasting, provides television and radio service.

Boston underwent considerable gentrification in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the cost of living is one of the highest in the United States. Housing prices are especially high.

Landmarks

Boston's landmarks are almost too numerous to count. They include many examples from the colonial and Revolutionary periods, such as the Old State House (built in 1713) and Faneuil Hall, still used as a marketplace. Revolutionary-era landmarks include the Old North Church, made famous for its lights that signaled whether the British forces were approaching by land or by sea.

The Boston Common, the large park in the center of the city, serves as a focal point. Next to the Common is the Massachusetts State House, with its gilded dome. The old State House, built in the early 1700s, is located a short distance away.

Cultural landmarks include research centers such as the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society as well as museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

Other important landmarks include Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team. The stadium, built in the early twentieth century, is one of the most historic ballparks in Major League Baseball.

History

Boston is a city of contrasts, one that has shown great commitment both to tradition and to change. Originally a Puritan "city on a hill," home of Protestant Christian orthodoxy, it is now a major center of Irish American Catholics. Originally with a mostly English population, Boston now has large populations of Irish, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Though known for its cultural conservatism, especially among the Brahmin elite, Boston has served as a center for social reform, supporting women's rights and the abolition of slavery.

Founded in 1630 by the Massachusetts Bay Company, Boston soon came to direct the cultural life of upper New England. The Boston Puritans eventually dominated the Plymouth colony on Cape Cod, founded by the Pilgrims in 1620.

Throughout the seventeenth century, Puritan clergy controlled Boston politics. This influence had faded somewhat by the time of the Revolution, but the Congregationalist clergy of Boston played a major role in supporting efforts for the American Revolution. The Congregational Church finally lost its official status in the early nineteenth century, a period in which Boston was becoming a center of political and religious liberalism.

Boston was a major center of colonial unrest in the 1760s and 1770s, the years following the French and Indian War. Boston merchants saw their businesses threatened by Britain's desire to enforce its maritime-commerce laws. Other residents were angered by taxes imposed by Britain to pay for the war effort. By the mid-1770s, it was clear that the colonists had had enough. In 1773, a Patriot group known as the Sons of Liberty dumped a shipload of British tea into Boston Harbor, signaling their anger at the British tax on tea. This act, known as the Boston Tea Party, helped lead Boston and the rest of the colonies into open revolt against Britain.

Boston business owners opposed war with Great Britain in 1812 because of their commercial interests with the former mother country. This brought them into opposition with President Jefferson, who imposed an embargo on US trade with Britain because of Britain's impressments of US sailors.

During the expansionist era after the War of 1812, Boston became a center of the early Industrial Revolution. Factories sprang up throughout the city and in surrounding areas. The need for cheap labor helped foster immigration from Europe, especially from impoverished Ireland.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Boston also became a major source of abolitionist activity. When war broke out, Boston and other parts of Massachusetts provided large numbers of troops for the Union cause.

The city prospered in the post–Civil War era. Manufacturing, railroads, finance, and shipbuilding continued to be major industries throughout both World Wars. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Boston Irish gradually increased their political and economic power. Some of the most successful families were the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy, served as mayor of Boston in the early twentieth century.

Despite its abolitionist past, Boston has its own history of racial intolerance. In 1974, a federal judge ordered students to be bused to other schools, in order to enforce desegregation. Many whites turned to violence against African Americans, who in turn fought back.

In 2013 two bombs were set off at the finish line of the annual Boston Marathon, a popular event that draws participants and spectators from across the country. The bombs killed three people and injured more than two hundred

In recent decades, Boston has made major strides in urban redevelopment. The city has cleaned up the Combat Zone, a downtown neighborhood that was known for prostitution and drug trade. The Big Dig project, which put Boston's downtown highways underground, was conceived partly as a way to open up more areas for parks and sunlight. Expansion of the city's public-transportation system was underway by 2015, though the project was plagued by financial concerns. By late 2017, the extension of the Green Line subway route, the oldest of the Boston lines, to the cities of Somerville and Medford, a project considered highly significant but consistently delayed, received a financial boost when the MBTA announced that it had officially awarded the extension contract to GLX Constructors. The Green Line extension broke ground in 2018. Overall, debates continued over how to balance maintaining such an old system with making improvements to adjust to increasing populations and technological demands.

In the late 2010s, South Boston's Seaport District was the site of a building boom and a number of high-profile businesses, including Amazon and General Electric, moved into that area. After historic storm-surge flooding in the Seaport, Long Wharf, the North End, and Morrisey Boulevard in 2018, Boston sought to devise resiliency plans to help the city adapt to climate-related sea level rise and storm surges. Around that time, the city also constructed a seawall to protect Logan International Airport.

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