Boston, situated at the head of Massachusetts Bay, is the principal seaport of
New England and the capital of Massachusetts. The present city includes such previously outlying communities as East and South Boston, Brookline, Roxbury, Charlestown, and Dorchester. The region may have been known to the Norsemen, but it was first explored and mapped by John Smith (1614). Individual settlers came from the Plymouth Colony (1621), and under Winthrop's leadership the site was colonized by the
Massachusetts Bay Company (1630), which established fisheries, agriculture, and the lumber trade, so that the town throve as a maritime center. Since it was colonized by Puritans, its early rule was theocratic, and such nonconformists as Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the Quakers were not tolerated. The Calvinists fostered education, for a literate clergy and laity were needed to understand the Bible, and Boston Latin School was the first American public school (1635), followed by Roxbury Latin School (1645). In 1636 Harvard was founded at
Cambridge across the Charles River. The views of the Puritans were further disseminated by such divines and laymen as John Cotton, Edward Johnson, John Eliot, the Mathers, Benjamin Thompson, Thomas Prince, Mather Byles, and others. The hold of the church began to decline with the rising power of the merchant class, and the beginnings of the Yankee attitude of mind may be observed in the writings of the Hell‐Fire Club and of such men as Samuel Sewall. The protests of the merchant class against the Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend acts (1767) helped foster the Revolution, and the ensuing friction led such Bostonians as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and James Otis to form the Sons of Liberty, who met at Faneuil Hall. Their actions precipitated the attack on Lieutenant‐Governor Hutchinson (1765), the Boston Massacre (1770), and the Boston Tea Party (1773), which was answered by the Boston Port Bill (1774). The closing of the port, which meant commercial ruin, was influential in provoking the outbreak of the war, in whose opening action Paul Revere and Boston members of the Minute Men were prominent. The British laid siege to the town after the battle of
Bunker Hill, but upon Howe's evacuation (March 1776) Boston ceased to be a theater of war.
During the early years of the republic, the city was a stronghold of Federalism, and its commercial interests led it to oppose the Embargo Act (1807), which crippled maritime development. This led to talk of secession and to refusal to cooperate actively in the War of 1812. Although the subsequent era of clipper trade brought prosperity, the city became increasingly industrial, and as it outgrew former limitations its intellectual attitude became more spacious and liberal. Despite 17th‐century changes within the church, such as the Half‐Way Covenant, the mid‐18th‐century reforms of such divines as Jonathan Mayhew, and the founding of King's Chapel (1749), the first Episcopal church and later the first Unitarian church, the shift to Unitarianism was not effected until the beginning of the 19th century, under the leadership of such men as Channing and Parker. Similar expressions of liberalism included the humanitarian activities of Dorothea Dix, Samuel G. Howe, and the antislavery, temperance, and feminist movements, in which Bostonians were leaders. The Brook Farm community was situated in West Roxbury. The democratization of education was fostered by Alcott's Temple School, the work of Horace Mann, the establishment of Lowell Institute (1839), and the growth of the lyceum. The city's supremacy in literary activity was marked by the founding of
The North American Review, the Anthology Club, the
Atlantic Monthly, the Saturday Club, and such publishing firms as Ticknor and Fields. Boston literary figures at this peak of New England culture included Parkman, Prescott, Motley, Holmes, Ripley, Palfrey, the elder Henry James, Howells, Aldrich, Julia Ward Howe, and E.E. Hale; nearby, in Cambridge and Concord, lived Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Dana, T.W. Higginson, and the Transcendentalists.
After the Civil War the idealism of what Holmes had called the intellectual “Hub of the Universe” cooled somewhat, while State Street, the financial district, directed energy toward making Boston a greater center for the importing of cotton, wool, and leather for the state's textile mills and shoe factories, whose products were shipped throughout the world. This caused a great influx of Irish and Italian workers, and the character of the city was changed, although its financial and social hegemony was still Brahmin. Its intellectual energies were less creative, and were turned to exploiting a pride of heritage, as in the scholarly antiquarianism of such bodies as the Massachusetts Historical Society. Nevertheless the Harvard professors contributed to the maintenance of cultural activities, among them being John Fiske, Agassiz, C.E. Norton, William James, C.W. Eliot, Royce, Barrett Wendell, and Santayana. At the same time, the aristocratic homes on Beacon Hill, under the shadow of Bulfinch's State House, or along the newly reclaimed Back Bay continued in their serene fashion, despite the advent of such newcomers as Howells depicted in
The Rise of Silas Lapham. That some of the old stock realized the breakdown of their traditions may be seen in Henry James's novels, and
The Education of Henry Adams. The new forces made themselves felt, on the other hand, when the growing consciousness of organized labor caused the Boston police to strike for higher wages (1919), and when the social discord was crystallized in the Sacco‐Vanzetti case. More recent Boston authors include Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, M.A. DeWolfe Howe, J.P. Marquand, Ben Ames Williams, Robert Lowell, David McCord, and Edwin O'Connor, in addition to the many scholarly writers associated with Harvard and other educational institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1859), Boston University (1869), Simmons College (1902), and Brandeis University (1948). Other educational foundations are the Boston Athenaeum (1805), Boston Public Library (1852), Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1870), and Gardner Museum (1902). Leading religious institutions include the Episcopal Trinity Church and the Mother Church of Christian Science. The cultural development of Boston has also partly derived from the influence of the painters, Smibert, Copley, Stuart, Earle, S.F.B. Morse, Chester Harding, Whistler, Homer, Sargent, William Hunt, La Farge, and Edwin Abbey; the sculptors, Greenough, Saint‐Gaudens, and French; the architects, McIntyre, Richardson, McKim, and Cram; and such early hymnodists as William Billings, succeeded by the 19th‐century musicians, Lowell Mason, J.K. Paine, Chadwick, and MacDowell, and the Handel and Haydn Society (1815),
Dwight's Journal of Music (1852), the New England Conservatory of Music (1867), and the Boston Symphony (1881), as well as the later composers, Arthur Foote, F.S. Converse, E.B. Hill, and Roger Sessions.
For Boston newspapers other than those prefixed by the name of the city, see
Massachusetts Centinel,
Independent Chronicle,
New England Courant,
Massachusetts Mercury,
New England Weekly Journal, and
The Weekly Rehearsal.
