History

Permanently settled in 1630 by representatives of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Boston was named for the hometown of some of the Puritans who left England to seek religious freedom in the New World. They met with little of the usual strife with the natives, members of the small, Algonquian-speaking Massachuset tribe that roamed the area. The natives might have used the peninsula they called Shawmut (possibly derived from "Mushau-womuk," or "unclaimed land") as a burial place. They grew corn on some harbor islands but made their permanent homes farther inland.

In 1632, the little peninsula became the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and over the next decade the population increased rapidly during the great Puritan migration. Thanks to its excellent location on a deep, sheltered harbor, Boston quickly became a center of shipbuilding, fishing, and trading.

The only thing more important than commerce was religion, and the Puritans exerted such a strong influence that their legacy survives to this day. A concrete reminder is Harvard College's original (1636) mission: preparing young men to be ministers. In 1659, the town fathers officially banned Christmas (the town children apparently had second thoughts -- records show that the holiday was back in favor by the 1680s). Another early example of puritanical stuffiness was recorded in 1673. One Captain Kemble was sentenced to confinement in the stocks for 2 hours because he kissed his wife on their front steps -- on a Sunday. He had been away for 3 years.

The Road to Revolution

In 1684, the Crown revoked the colony's charter, and the inhabitants came under tighter British control. Laws increasing taxes and restricting trading activities gradually led to trouble. The situation came to a head after the French and Indian War (known in Europe as the Seven Years' War) ended in 1763.

Having helped fight for the British, the independent-minded colonists were outraged when the Crown expected them to help pay off the war debt. The Sugar Act of 1764 imposed tariffs on sugar, wine, and coffee, mostly affecting those engaged in trade; the 1765 Stamp Act taxed everything printed, from legal documents to playing cards, affecting virtually everyone. Boycotts, demonstrations, and riots ensued. The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 was too little, too late -- the revolutionary slogan "No taxation without representation" had already taken hold.

The Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed taxes on paper, glass, and tea, sparking more unrest. The following year, British troops occupied Boston. Perhaps inevitably, tension led to violence. In the Boston Massacre of 1770, five colonists were killed in a scuffle with the redcoats. The first to die was a former slave named Crispus Attucks; another was 17-year-old Samuel Maverick. The site, represented by a circle of cobblestones, sits on what is now State Street, and the colonists' graves are nearby.

Tea & No Sympathy

Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts but kept the tea tax and, in 1773, granted the nearly bankrupt East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade with the colonies. The idea was to undercut the price of smuggled tea, but the colonists weren't swayed. In December, three British ships sat at anchor in Boston Harbor, waiting for their cargo of tea to be unloaded. Before that could happen, the rabble-rousing Sons of Liberty, some poorly disguised as Indians, boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party became a rallying point for both sides.

The British responded by closing the port until the tea was paid for and forcing Bostonians to house the soldiers who began to flood the community. They soon numbered 4,000 in a town of 16,000. Mutual distrust ran high -- Paul Revere wrote of helping form "a committee for the purpose of watching the movements of the British troops." When the royal commander in Boston, General Gage, learned that the patriots were accumulating arms and ammunition, he dispatched men to destroy the stockpiles.

A New World Order

Troops marched from Boston toward Lexington and Concord late on April 18, 1775. On their famous "midnight ride," William Dawes and Revere alerted the colonists to the British advance. They sounded the warning to the local militia companies, the Minutemen, who mobilized for the impending confrontation. The next day, some 700 British soldiers under Major John Pitcairn emerged victorious from a skirmish in Lexington. Later that day, they were routed at Concord and forced to retreat to Charlestown.

It took the redcoats almost an entire day to make the trip, along the route now marked "Battle Road." You can cover it in a car in about half an hour. Thanks in no small part to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1861 poem "Paul Revere's Ride" ("Listen my children and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere"), Lexington and Concord are closely associated with the beginning of the Revolution. In the early stages, military activity left its mark all over eastern Massachusetts, particularly in Cambridge. Royalist sympathizers, or Tories, were concentrated so heavily along one stretch of Brattle Street that it was called "Tory Row." When the tide began to turn, George Washington made his headquarters on the same street (in a house later occupied by Longfellow; it's now a National Park Service site). On nearby Cambridge Common is the spot where Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775.

The British won the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually fought on Breed's Hill) in Charlestown on June 17, 1775, but at the cost of half their forces. They abandoned Boston the following March 17. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Although many Bostonians fought in the 6-year war that followed, no more battles were fought in Boston.

Commerce & Culture

After the war, Boston again became a center of business. Fishing, whaling, and trade with the Far East dominated the economy. Exotic spices and fruits, textiles, and porcelain were familiar luxuries in Boston and nearby Salem. The influential merchant families who became known as Boston Brahmins spearheaded a cultural renaissance that flourished even after the War of 1812 ravaged international shipping, toppling Boston from its commercial pedestal. As banking and manufacturing rose in importance, Boston took a back seat to New York and Philadelphia in size and influence. But the "Athens of America" became known for fine art and architecture, including the luxurious homes on Beacon Hill, and a burgeoning intellectual community.

In 1822, Boston became a city. From 1824 to 1826, Mayor Josiah Quincy oversaw the landfill project that moved the waterfront away from Faneuil Hall. The market building constructed at that time, which still stands, was named in his honor. The undertaking was one of many, all over the city, in which hills were lopped off and deposited in the water, transforming the coastline and skyline. For example, the filling of the Mill Pond, now the area around North Station, began in 1807 and in 25 years consumed the summits of Copp's and Beacon hills.

In the 19th century, landfill work tripled the city's area, creating badly needed space. The largest of the projects, started in 1835 and completed in 1882, was the filling of the Back Bay, the body of mud flats and marshes that gave its name to the present-day neighborhood. Beginning in 1857, much of the fill came by railroad from suburban Needham.

By the mid-1800s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and even Charles Dickens (briefly) and Mark Twain (more briefly) had appeared on the local literary scene. William Lloyd Garrison published the weekly Liberator newspaper, a powerful voice in the antislavery and social reform movements. Boston became an important stop on the Underground Railroad, the secret network the abolitionists developed to smuggle runaway slaves into Canada.

Local Glory

During the Civil War (1861-65), abolitionist sentiment was the order of the day in Boston -- to such a degree that the rolls listing the war dead in Harvard's Memorial Hall include only members of the Union Army. Massachusetts' contributions to the war effort included enormous quantities of firearms, shoes, blankets, tents, and men.

Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a former member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, helped recruit the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiments. The movie Glory tells the story of the 54th, the first army unit made up of free black soldiers, and its white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. The regiment's memorial, a gorgeous bas-relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, stands on Boston Common opposite the State House.

A Capital City

The railroad boom of the 1820s and 1830s and the flood of immigration that began soon after had made New England an industrial center. Then as now, Boston was the region's unofficial capital. Thousands of immigrants from Ireland settled in the city, the first ethnic group to do so in great numbers since the French Huguenots in the early 18th century. Signs reading NO IRISH NEED APPLY became scarce as the new arrivals gained political power, and the first Irish mayor was elected in 1885.

By this time, Boston's class split was a chasm, with the influx of immigrants adding to the social tension. The Irish led the way and were followed by Italian, Portuguese, and eastern European Jewish immigrants. Each group had its own neighborhoods, churches, schools, newspapers, and livelihoods that intersected only occasionally with "proper" society.

Even as the upper crust was sowing cultural seeds that would wind up enriching everyone -- the Boston Symphony, the Boston Public Library, and the Museum of Fine Arts were established in the second half of the 19th century -- its prudish behavior gained Boston a reputation for making snobbery an art form. In 1878 the censorious Watch and Ward Society was founded (as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice), and the phrase "banned in Boston" soon made its way into the American vocabulary. In 1889, the private St. Botolph Club removed John Singer Sargent's portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner from public view (it's now at the museum that bears her name) because her dress was too tight.

The Boston Brahmins could keep their new neighbors out of many areas of their lives, but not politics. The forebears of the Kennedy clan had appeared on the scene -- John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Rose Kennedy's father, was elected mayor in 1910 -- and the city was changing.

World War II bolstered Boston's Depression-ravaged industrial economy, and the war's end touched off an economic transformation. Shipping declined, along with New England's textile, shoe, and glass industries, at the same time that students on the G. I. Bill poured into area colleges and universities. The rise of the local high technology industry led to new construction, changing the look of the city yet again. The 1960s saw the beginning of a building boom that continues to this day (after a lull during the recession of the late 1980s).

The Turn of the Century

The mid-1970s brought the Boston busing crisis, sparked by a court-ordered school desegregation plan enacted in 1974 that touched off riots, violence, and a white boycott. Because of "white flight," Boston is now what urban planners call a "doughnut city." It has a relatively large black population (23.8% of Boston residents are black, compared with 11% of the U.S. population) surrounded by many lily-white suburbs. The 2000 Census showed that Boston had become a "majority minority" city, with whites making up less than 50% of the population for the first time. The city has battled its reputation for racism with varying degrees of success. The school system has yet to fully recover from the traumatic experience of busing, but every year it sends thousands of students on to the institutions of higher learning that continue to be Boston's greatest claim to fame.

The economic boom of the 1990s made a lot of noise in the Boston area, home to many high-tech businesses, financial-services firms, and venture capitalists. The bust that followed took its toll, but some sectors of the economy remained relatively strong. One example is construction, which benefited from ongoing development and the enormous highway construction project known as the Big Dig. The last piece of the elevated expressway, which the Big Dig replaced with a tunnel, came down in early 2006. The real-estate downturn that began in late 2005 put a damper on the red-hot Boston market, but the city remains one of the most expensive places in the country to live (and to visit, if you don't budget carefully).

The social changes of the early 21st century are less visible but no less important. National and international awareness of the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal originated with a Pulitzer Prize-winning series that appeared in the Boston Globe in 2002. And in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that not allowing gay couples to marry violated the state constitution. After an explosion of publicity, gay marriage fell out of the headlines while remaining very much on the political radar. The issue is likely to lead to a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment, which, for procedural reasons, can't happen before 2008. That vote, when and if it happens, will fall almost 2 years into the administration of Deval Patrick, who in 2006 became the second African American since Reconstruction (after Virginia's Douglas Wilder) elected governor.

To get a sense of what present-day Boston is (and is not) like, hit the streets. The puritanical Bostonian is virtually extinct, but you can still uncover traces of the groups, institutions, and events that shaped Boston's history and created the complex city you see today.