Boston

History

The city of Boston was founded in 1630 by the Puritans, three years after the landing at Plymouth Rock. It was named for the town in Lincolnshire, England, from which some of the first settlers had come. Within the first decade, it was already flourishing: the nation's first school (1635) and first post office (1639) were founded, as well as Harvard University (1636), then called Harvard College and established for the training of future ministers. Within ten years, the population reached 16,000. With its excellent natural harbor, Boston became a center for shipping, shipbuilding, and other maritime occupations.

In 1684 the British revoked the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (of which Boston was already the capital), and the city came under direct British rule. In the following decades and throughout the eighteenth century tensions between Bostonians and their rulers—like tensions elsewhere in the colonies—grew. Known as the "Birthplace of the American Revolution," Boston was the site of the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), and the Battle of Bunker Hill (1775).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, shipping declined in importance as manufacturing grew. The first railroad connected Boston with inland areas of Massachusetts by the late 1830s. As home to William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, during the same period, Boston became known as a center of the abolitionist movement, as well as the site of a great intellectual flowering that came to include such eminent figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), and Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894).

The city's new industrial base was assured of a steady supply of labor as new immigrants began arriving from Ireland by mid-century. Nearly 243 hectares (600 acres) were added to Boston with the reclamation of the Back Bay's lowlands between 1857 and 1894. In addition, Boston annexed the nearby towns of Roxbury, Dorchester, Charles-town, Brighton, and West Roxbury. Major cultural and scientific institutions founded in the following the Civil War included Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the New England Conservatory of Music.

The decline of Boston's industrial base in the early twentieth century was hastened by the Great Depression of the 1930s, although wartime mobilization the following decade brought with it a temporary reprieve. After World War II (1939–45), however, New England's traditional manufacturing

industries—textiles, shoes, and glass—once again weakened, as did its shipping industry. However, its colleges and universities brought new life to the city as thousands of students enrolled on the G.I. Bill. (In its original version, signed into law in 1944, the G.I. Bill entitled anyone with 90 days of service in the U.S. military to one year of higher education. Each additional month of active duty earned a month of schooling, up to a maximum of 48 months.) In the post-war decades, Boston grew into a major financial and commercial center. A construction boom beginning in the late 1950s changed the city's skyline with the completion of the Prudential Center in 1959. In 1962 Scollay Square was torn down to make way for the new Government Center complex, and the restored Faneuil Hall Marketplace opened in 1976.

Racial tensions erupted into violence in the mid-seventies with the advent of court-ordered busing to desegregate the public schools, and whites organized a boycott of the schools. By the 1990s, "white flight" had given Boston a disproportionately large black population (25 percent) while many whites had moved to suburbs surrounding the city. In the 1980s and 1990s Boston became one of the country's foremost centers for high technology, with research-based firms clustered in a band along Route 128, which encircles the city.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of businesses left Boston and relocated to surrounding areas of Massachusetts and other states, driven out by high taxes and lease rates and a general downturn in the region's economy as the country slipped into recession and unemployment rose. However, the city effectively confronted its fiscal problems, and by 1993 a recovery was under way. In the same year, Thomas Menino became Boston's first Italian-American mayor.

In 1988 a massive highway construction project was approved to relocate the city's Central Artery (I-93) underground, reclaim the land above it, and link the Massachusetts Turnpike to Logan International Airport. The expected completion date was 2004.