Boston

Boston. Located on a peninsula the Indians called Shawmut and now the capital of Massachusetts, Boston was settled in 1630 by Puritans led by John Winthrop. Winthrop set the tone for Boston's tradition of civic responsibility when, aboard the Arbella en route to New England, he urged the settlers to build a harmonious, godly community that would be “a city upon a hill” and “a beacon to all nations.” As Boston prospered as a maritime center, Puritan ministers like Increase and Cotton Mather struggled to preserve Winthrop's vision.

England interfered only sporadically in Massachusetts's affairs, so when imperial policy tightened after 1763, Bostonians reacted strongly. Urban unrest culminated in the Boston Tea Party (1773), which led to the Coercive Acts and to the First Continental Congress (1774), putting Boston in the forefront of the American Revolution.

Boston's economic development, already eclipsed by that of New York City by the 1770s, was further stunted by the postwar depression, New England's agricultural decline, and trade disruptions associated with the War of 1812. Ultimately, however, the war spurred domestic manufacturing to replace imported goods. A group of businessmen known as the Boston Associates helped bring industrialization to America by building textile mills in nearby Waltham, Lowell, and Lawrence.

Amid shifting economic fortunes, Boston thrived as an intellectual and cultural center. The artist John Singleton Copley and the architect Charles Bulfinch were Boston natives. The transcendentalist utopian experiment Brook Farm (1841–1847) was located nearby. Many leading lights of the American literary renaissance including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, lived in Boston or such nearby towns as Concord and Salem. The city was a major publishing center, and across the Charles River in Cambridge was Harvard College. Winthrop's “city on a hill” became the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes's “hub of the solar system.” Boston was home to many Antebellum Era reformers, including William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist journal Liberator. The reformist impulse drew strength from the liberal Protestant movement exemplified by Unitarianism, also rooted in Boston. The later nineteenth century saw the establishment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1865), the Museum of Fine Arts (1870), and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1881). The Christian Science “Mother Church” was dedicated in Boston in 1895.

The nineteenth century also brought great demographic changes, as the native‐born “Brahmin” elite confronted successive waves of immigrants, including French Canadians, Irish (especially after Ireland's 1840s famine years), and, by the turn of the century, Italians and eastern European Jews. A growing African American community included William Monroe Trotter, editor of a black newspaper, the Boston Guardian. The Irish gained political power through such colorful figures as James Michael Curley (1874–1958) and John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (1863–1950), grandfather of President John F. Kennedy.

Suburbanization and a decline in manufacturing caused economic problems and population losses through much of the twentieth century. The 1960s saw racial conflicts over school busing between black and white ethnic neighborhoods. But beginning around the same time, Boston experienced dynamic economic growth based a on high‐tech electronics industry, finance, medicine, education, and publishing. As the century ended, thanks to these knowledge‐based industries and its rich history, Boston retained its cachet as an intellectual and cultural mecca.
See also Civil Rights Movement; Colonial Era; Early Republic, Era of the; Immigration; Irish Americans; Italian Americans; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Puritanism; Revolutionary War; Revolution and Constitution, Era of the; Sixties, The; Textile Industry; Transcendentalism; Unitarianism and Universalism; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Shaun O'Connell , Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, 1990.
Thomas H. O'Connor , Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses: A Short History of Boston, 3d ed., 1991.

Christopher Berkeley