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Boston was founded on September 17,
1630, by Puritan colonists from England. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony are sometimes confused with the Pilgrims, who founded Plymouth Colony ten
years earlier in what is today Bristol County, Plymouth County, and Barnstable
County, Massachusetts. The two groups, which differed in religious practice, are
historically distinct. The separate colonies were not united until the formation
of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1691.
The Shawmut Peninsula was connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus and was
surrounded by the waters of Massachusetts Bay and the Back Bay, an estuary of
the Charles River. Several prehistoric Native American archaeological sites that
were excavated in the city have shown that the peninsula was inhabited as early
as 5,000 BC. Boston's early European settlers first called the area
Trimountaine, but later renamed the town after Boston, Lincolnshire, England,
from which several prominent colonists had emigrated. Massachusetts Bay Colony's
original governor, John Winthrop, gave a famous sermon entitled "A Model of
Christian Charity," popularly known as the "City on a Hill" sermon, which
espoused the idea that Boston had a special covenant with God. (Winthrop also
led the signing of the Cambridge Agreement, which is regarded as a key founding
document of the city.) Puritan ethics molded a stable and well-structured
society in Boston. For example, shortly after Boston's settlement, Puritans
founded America's first public school, Boston Latin School (1635). Between 1636
and 1698, six major smallpox epidemics in Boston had caused a substantial number
of deaths. Boston was the largest town in British North America until
Philadelphia grew larger in the mid-18th century.
Map showing a British tactical evaluation of Boston in 1775In the 1770s, British
attempts to exert more-stringent control on the thirteen colonies—primarily via
taxation—led to the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea
Party, and several early battles—including the Battle of Lexington and Concord,
the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Siege of Boston—occurred in or near the city.
During this period, Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride. After the
Revolution, Boston had become one of the world's wealthiest international
trading ports because of the city's consolidated seafaring tradition. Exports
included rum, fish, salt, and tobacco. During this era, descendants of old
Boston families were regarded as the nation's social and cultural elites; they
were later dubbed the Boston Brahmins.
View of Boston from Dorchester Heights, 1841The Embargo Act of 1807, adopted
during the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812 significantly curtailed Boston's
harbor activity. Although foreign trade returned after these hostilities,
Boston's merchants had found alternatives for their capital investments in the
interim. Manufacturing became an important component of the city's economy, and
by the mid-1800s, the city's industrial manufacturing overtook international
trade in economic importance. Until the early 1900s, Boston remained one of the
nation's largest manufacturing centers and was notable for its garment
production and leather-goods industries. A network of small rivers bordering the
city and connecting it to the surrounding region made for easy shipment of goods
and led to a proliferation of mills and factories. Later, a dense network of
railroads facilitated the region's industry and commerce. From the mid-19th to
late 19th century, Boston flourished culturally. It became renowned for its
rarefied literary culture and lavish artistic patronage. It also became a center
of the abolitionist movement. The city reacted strongly to the Fugitive Slave
Law of 1850, which contributed to President Franklin Pierces attempt to make an
example of Boston after the Burns Fugitive Slave Case.
Scollay Square in the 1880sIn 1822, the citizens of Boston voted to change the
official name from "the Town of Boston" to "the City of Boston", and on March 4,
1822, the people of Boston accepted the charter incorporating the City. At the
time Boston was chartered as a city, the population was about 46,226, while the
area of the city was only 4.7 square miles (12 km2). In the 1820s, Boston's
population began to swell, and the city's ethnic composition changed
dramatically with the first wave of European immigrants. Irish immigrants
dominated the first wave of newcomers during this period. By 1850, about 35,000
Irish lived in Boston. In the latter half of the 19th century, the city saw
increasing numbers of Irish, Germans, Lebanese, Syrians, French Canadians, and
Russian and Polish Jews settle in the city. By the end of the 19th century,
Boston's core neighborhoods had become enclaves of ethnically distinct
immigrants—Italians inhabited the North End, Irish dominated South Boston and
Charlestown, and Russian Jews lived in the West End. Irish and Italian
immigrants brought with them Roman Catholicism. Currently, Catholics make up
Boston's largest religious community, and since the early 20th century, the
Irish have played a major role in Boston politics—prominent figures include the
Kennedy's, Tip O'Neill, and John F. Fitzgerald.
Haymarket Square, 1909Between 1631 and 1890, the city tripled its physical size
by land reclamation—by filling in marshes, mud flats, and gaps between wharves
along the waterfront —a process that Walter Muir White hill called "cutting down
the hills to fill the coves." The largest reclamation efforts took place during
the 1800s. Beginning in 1807, the crown of Beacon Hill was used to fill in a
50-acre (20 ha) mill pond that later became the Haymarket Square area. The
present-day State House sits atop this lowered Beacon Hill. Reclamation projects
in the middle of the century created significant parts of the South End, the
West End, the Financial District, and Chinatown. After The Great Boston Fire of
1872, workers used building rubble as landfill along the downtown waterfront.
During the mid-to-late 19th century, workers filled almost 600 acres (2.4 km²)
of brackish Charles River marshlands west of the Boston Common with gravel
brought by rail from the hills of Needham Heights. Also, the city annexed the
adjacent towns of South Boston (1804), East Boston (1836), Roxbury (1868),
Dorchester (including present day Mattapan and a portion of South Boston)
(1870), Brighton (including present day Allston) (1874), West Roxbury (including
present day Jamaica Plain and Roslindale) (1874), Charlestown (1874), and Hyde
Park (1912).
Government Center, 1999By the early and mid-20th century, the city was in
decline as factories became old and obsolete, and businesses moved out of the
region for cheaper labor elsewhere. Boston responded by initiating various urban
renewal projects under the direction of the Boston Redevelopment Authority
(BRA), which was established in 1957. In 1958, BRA initiated a project to
improve the historic West End neighborhood. Extensive demolition was met with
vociferous public opposition. BRA subsequently reevaluated its approach to urban
renewal in its future projects, including the construction of Government Center.
In 1965, the first Community Health Center in the United States opened, the
Columbia Point Health Center, in the Dorchester neighborhood. It mostly served
the massive Columbia Point public housing complex adjoining it, which was built
in 1953. The health center is still in operation and was rededicated in 1990 as
the Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center.
The John F. Kennedy Library, located on the Columbia Point peninsula, 2007By the
1970s, the city's economy boomed after 30 years of economic downturn. A large
number of high rises were constructed in the Financial District and in Boston's
Back Bay during this time period. This boom continued into the mid-1980s and has
since begun again. Boston now has the second largest skyline in the Northeast
(after New York) in terms of the number of buildings reaching a height of over
500 feet. New construction and proposals in recent years are enlarging the
skyline of the city once again. Hospitals such as Massachusetts General
Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women's Hospital
led the nation in medical innovation and patient care. Schools such as Boston
University, the Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University, and Boston
Conservatory attracted students to the area. Nevertheless, the city experienced
conflict starting in 1974 over desegregation busing, which resulted in unrest
and violence around public schools throughout the mid-1970s. In 1984, the City
of Boston gave control of the Columbia Point public housing complex to a private
developer, who redeveloped and revitalized the property from its rundown and
dangerous state into an attractive residential mixed-income community called
Harbor Point Apartments, which opened in 1988 and was completed by 1990. It was
the first federal housing project to be converted to private, mixed-income
housing in the United States, and served as a model for the federal HUD HOPE VI
public housing revitalization program that began in 1992.
The North End has been experiencing gentrification since the completion of the
Big Dig in the early 2000s, which moved the elevated Central Artery freeway
mostly into tunnels. This has also been changing the traditional Italian
American culture of the area. In the early 21st century, the city has become an
intellectual, technological, and political center. It has, however, experienced
a loss of regional institutions, which included the acquisition of The Boston
Globe by The New York Times, and the loss to mergers and acquisitions of local
financial institutions such as Fleet Boston Financial, which was acquired by
Charlotte-based Bank of America in 2004. Boston-based department stores Jordan
Marsh and Filenes's have both been merged into the New York–based Macy's. Boston
has also experienced gentrification in the latter half of the 20th century, with
housing prices increasing sharply since the 1990s. Living expenses have risen,
and Boston has one of the highest costs of living in the United States, and was
ranked the 99th most expensive major city in the world in a 2008 survey of 143
cities. Despite cost, Boston ranks high on livability ratings, ranking 35th
worldwide in quality of living in 2009 in a survey of 215 major cities.
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