Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE

CAMBRIDGE, a town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony originally known as Newtowne, was settled in 1630 by a group of seven hundred Puritans from England who were determined to create a pure religious foundation in the New World. Originally governed by John Winthrop, who abandoned the town for Boston, Newtowne was a well-organized town, with a system of streets laid out in a grid pattern, including a marketplace, Winthrop Square.

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At the beginning of the twenty-first century the town was bounded by Eliot Square, Linden Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and the Charles River. In 1636, Harvard College was founded to educate young men in the ministry. By the time of the American Revolution, Cambridge had become a farming community, but after the fighting began on 19 April 1775, more than twenty thousand armed militia members from New England arrived in Cambridge. Soldiers, including George Washington's army, camped on the Cambridge Commons and were quartered in the Harvard College buildings until April 1776.

In 1846, Cambridge became a city, unifying three towns: rural Old Cambridge; residential Cambridgeport, home to William Lloyd Garrison; and East Cambridge, developed in 1809 after the completion of the Canal Bridge. This town would be the chief industrial center of the city until the 1880s. The growth of urban housing and the influx of eastern European and Irish immigrants, as well as the construction of the East Cambridge jail, led to an impetus for prison reform, with Dorothea Dix at the forefront of this movement. Cambridge has always been an innovator, including the integration of its school system, which enticed many African Americans to move there. Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ran a boardinghouse in the 1870s in Cambridge.

Twenty-first-century Cambridge has retained its charm and maintains a culturally diverse population of approximately ninety-five thousand. Home to Harvard, Radcliffe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lesley College, Cambridge attracts students from all over the world and has become a center for biotechnology and software research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burton, John Daniel. Puritan Town and Gown: Harvard College and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636 –1800. Ph.D. diss. Williamsburg, Va.: College of William and Mary, 1996.

———. "The Awful Judgements of God upon the Land: Smallpox in Colonial Cambridge." New England Quarterly 74 (September 2001): 495–507.

Paige, Lucius R. History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1877. Boston: Houghton, 1877. Rev. ed. 1930.

Jennifer Harrison

See also Harvard University ; Massachusetts Bay Colony .