The capital and largest city of Massachusetts, Boston is a port of approximately forty-six square miles and the center of a metropolitan area of approximately 5.8 million people. According to the 2000 Census, Boston, with a population of 589,141, ranks as the twentieth largest city in the nation. This figure marks a 2.6 percent increase over 1990, when the population was 574,283.
Among the country's oldest cities, Boston is most famous for its role in the American Revolution; for its leading part in the nation's literary life; and as a center of social reform, education, and cultural accomplishment. The Boston area is the hub of New England's cultural and economic life and has a remarkable collection of educational institutions, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston College, Tufts University, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Northeastern University.
The Boston area is the birthplace of U.S. presidents John Adams (Quincy), John Quincy Adams (Quincy), John F. Kennedy (Brookline), and George H. W. Bush (Milton). Historic sites are dedicated to the first three, and the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum is in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.
Boston's rich history is evident throughout the city. The Boston African American National Historic Site offers the Black Heritage Trail on Beacon Hill. The Freedom Trail connects such historic sites as the Boston Common, the Charles Bulfinch–designed State House atop Beacon Hill, the Old State House, the Old Corner Bookstore, the Old South Meeting House, Faneuil Hall, the Paul Revere House, and Old North Church. Walkers may follow the trail over to Charlestown to see the USS Constitution, where Old Ironsides resides in the old Navy Yard.
Colonial Era
Boston was founded in 1630 by English Puritans led by John Winthrop and named after the hometown of many of their band. These early settlers sought to create a "godly commonwealth" but their stress on conformity meant banishment for Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and others who failed to accept Puritan ways. Williams moved on to establish a separate, successful colony in Rhode Island.
Others seeking economic opportunities and land also left the town to settle elsewhere in New England, yet Boston continued to thrive. Boston's early economy was based on shipbuilding, fishing, and the coastal and West Indian trade, all of which resulted in the town becoming England's largest North American settlement.
Boston's fame as a literary and cultural center dates from its earliest years and stemmed from the Puritan attention to education. In 1635 Bostonians established the Boston Latin School, the first free public school in the colonies that would become the United States, while in 1636 they chartered Harvard College in Cambridge.
In the 1690s the Massachusetts Bay Colony received a royal charter under England's new sovereigns, William and Mary, which placed the theretofore largely independent enterprise under closer British control. Because Boston's economy and standing were already in decline in the eighteenth century, British imperial reorganization following the French and Indian War was especially harmful to the town. In the 1760s the British government tightened its control over its colonies, leading directly to the American Revolution.
Creating a Nation
Boston's Faneuil Hall is called the "cradle of liberty" because of the stirring orations in opposition to British colonial government given there, but Bostonians' claim to birthing American independence rests largely with Samuel Adams. In the 1760s Adams organized the Sons of Liberty and aroused Bostonians to the dangers of British taxes. He fostered anti-British sentiment in 1770 by devising the term "Boston Massacre" to characterize how British troops shot and killed five Bostonians, including Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave.
The Adams-organized Boston Tea Party on the night of 16 December 1773 did even more to separate the colonies from Britain. Adams organized protests against imperial taxes on tea, and Bostonians masquerading as Indians boarded the ships carrying the offending cargo and dumped it into the harbor. In response, British officials closed the port of Boston and imposed martial law. Adams organized colonial opposition to these so-called Intolerable Acts and attended the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774 with his cousin, John Adams.
Searching for military supplies, British troops were met on 19 April 1775 outside of Boston at Lexington and Concord by local militia or "minutemen" who had been warned by Paul Revere and others. The famous "shot heard 'round the world" began the American Revolution. The hostilities continued as British forces attacked rebels who were in Charlestown, across the river from Boston, on 17 June 1775. The British won the famous conflict known as the Battle of Bunker Hill only after suffering heavy losses. (Although the actual fighting took place on neighboring Breed's Hill, the name Bunker Hill stuck and is commemorated by a 221-foot granite obelisk, known as the Bunker Hill Monument.) George Washington arrived soon after the battle to take charge of the newly formed Continental Army, and in March 1776 succeeded in banishing the British from Boston by strategically placing cannons on a hillside overlooking the town. Thus ended Boston's part in the fighting.
The Nineteenth Century
In the 1790s the famous China trade established Boston's economic base for the nineteenth century. Boston capitalists built textile mills in the early nineteenth century, but later in the century Boston declined economically relative to New York City. Boston changed in the early nineteenth century through its incorporation as a city in 1822 and as a result of landfill operations that created the new Back Bay and the South End neighborhoods. By the 1840s Boston had become a famous literary and cultural center, boasting such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. At the same time Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe's stewardship of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston pioneered new methods of education. Similarly, the Boston schoolteacher Dorothea Dix led the way in improving the care of mentally ill people throughout the state and nation.
William Lloyd Garrison's uncompromising, radical abolitionism firmly established Boston's reputation as a hotbed of reform and a center of moral leadership for the nation in the Civil War era. During that war, Boston's Robert Gould Shaw, a young white officer, led the nation's first all-black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, into battle and everlasting fame in the tragic 1863 assault on South Carolina's Fort Wagner.
In the decades after the Civil War, so-called Boston Brahmin families controlled the city's economy and supported cultural institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Harvard University. During this period the fashionable Back Bay area was completed along with Copley Square, graced by architect Henry H. Richardson's masterpiece, Trinity Church, and its impressive neighbor, the Boston Public Library.
Immigrants and Change
Boston's demographics changed the city in the second half of the nineteenth century. The population rose as large numbers of New Englanders and European immigrants crowded into the city. In the 1860s and 1870s, Boston annexed the adjacent streetcar suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury, and Brighton. The Irish predominated among the immigrants and, with the election of mayors John F. Fitzgerald ("Honey Fitz," grandfather of John F. Kennedy) in 1905 and James Michael Curley in 1914, seemed destined to control Boston's politics.
Winning four mayoralty elections in the years between 1914 and 1945, Curley also served several terms in Congress as well as one stint as governor of the state. Despite considerable accomplishments in public works projects, he is most renowned for his chronic corruption, two jail sentences, and his willing ness to "do it for a friend." Many of the friends that Curley assisted were Irish, but countless others were Italian and Jewish.
The Late Twentieth Century
The harmful effects of the Great Depression and the long decline of the New England textile industry lasted into the 1950s in Boston. At mid-century the city was close to fiscal and political bankruptcy. Fortuitously, however, economic and political circumstances in the second half of the twentieth century created the New Boston. The dazzling rise of the computer industry, largely resulting from the presence of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in neighboring Cambridge, allowed Boston to make a remarkable economic recovery. In the last decades of the century, the emergence of a knowledge-based economy made Boston the envy of many cities.
In the 1960s Mayor John F. Collins and Edward J. Logue, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, created a new City Hall and Government Center. During the mayoralty of Kevin H. White, who succeeded Collins in 1969, Boston's skyline was drastically changed as skyscrapers began to rise above the modest heights of older buildings.
During those same years, however, racial conflict overshadowed the emergence of a revitalized downtown. As fearful, racially biased groups of citizens reacted violently to court-ordered desegregation of the city's public schools in the 1970s, Boston drew national attention and scorn. The city's long-standing African American population increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century and grew beyond its old geographical borders. Raymond L. Flynn succeeded Kevin White as mayor in 1984 by drawing some of the city's ethnic and racial groups together. Thomas M. Menino, Flynn's successor, became the city's first Italian American mayor in 1993; he was reelected in 1997 and 2001.
The most famous Boston politician of the late twentieth century was Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. O'Neill, known for popularizing the adage that "all politics is local," won federal funding for Boston's Big Dig, the most ambitious public works project in American urban history. This Central Artery/Tunnel Project to place interstate highways underground is opening up acres of surface space downtown for parks and buildings.
Long claiming moral and intellectual distinction as the Athens of America, Boston has left behind much of its widely celebrated provincialism. It remains, however, a charming city that is also now counted among the most exciting in America.
Bibliography
Handlin, Oscar. Boston's Immigrants, 1790–1880: A Study in Acculturation. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Kennedy, Lawrence W. Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
O'Connell, Shaun. Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
O'Connor, Thomas H. The Hub: Boston Past and Present. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.
Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Whitehill, Walter Muir, and Lawrence W. Kennedy. Boston: A Topographical History. 3rd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
—Lawrence W. Kennedy
