MASSACHUSETTS

MASSACHUSETTS. One of the oldest settlements in British North America, Massachusetts was the site of the outbreak of the American Revolution (1775–1783), and later the state most closely associated with the movements to promote public education, to reform the care of the mentally ill, to abolish slavery, and to restrict immigration. Massachusetts's people refer to it either as "the state" or "the Commonwealth." At the close of the twentieth century, Massachusetts continued to be a national leader in business, politics, higher education, medicine, high technology, environmental protection, and the arts and sciences.

Topography

Massachusetts is the center of New England, as it is the only state that shares a border with four of the other states in the region. It is south of New Hampshire and Vermont, east of New York, and north of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Maine, which was part of the Commonwealth until it achieved its independence in 1820, is separated from Massachusetts by less than twenty miles of New Hampshire's Atlantic coast. The state's land area is 7,840 square miles, and it ranks forty-fifth among the states. Its highest point is Mount Greylock, 3,491 feet, which is in the northwest corner of the state, near Williamstown. Significant on the Atlantic coast is the state's highest drumlin, the Great Blue Hill, south of Boston, used for hiking, skiing, and as a nature preserve.

The Atlantic coastline is nearly 1,500 miles long, and includes Cape Ann, north of Boston; Cape Cod, south of Plymouth; and Buzzard's Bay, which washes the shores of New Bedford and Fall River, two venerable former textile mill towns, whose fame is derived from their participation in the whaling industry. In the Atlantic, south of Cape Cod, are the islands Martha's Vineyard (106 square miles) and Nantucket (46 square miles.)

The Connecticut River flows from north to south across the west central portion of the state and passes the industrial cities of Holyoke, Chicopee, and Springfield. The Taunton River in the southeastern corner of the state flows into an arm of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. The Merrimack, which flows from north to south within New Hampshire, flows from west to east after it enters Massachusetts. In this northeast corner of the state, the border with New Hampshire was set ten miles north of the Merrimack so that the communities situated along its banks could tend to their river without the complication of two separate state governments. The urban and suburban Charles River is eighty miles long, flows from south to north through some of the western suburbs, and empties into Boston Harbor. During the 1990s. the Metropolitan District Commission, a state agency, began reclaiming the banks of the Charles River—once abandoned public lands upon which adjacent residential and industrial property owners had encroached—by restoring the natural river banks and building a set of park-like pedestrian and bicycle pathways.

Perhaps equal in importance to the state's natural waterways is the system of manmade reservoirs and aqueducts that bring fresh water from the rural west to the state's urban east. During the 1930s, a dam on the Swift River near Ware created the Quabbin reservoir, under which four rural towns were submerged. The Quabbin water joins the older Wachusett water system. On its way to Boston the aqueduct crosses the Charles River on the high Echo Bridge at the river's spectacular Hemlock Gorge.

Population

The state's population at the turn of the twenty-first century continued to grow, but at a rate much lower than the nation as a whole. The population reached 6,349,097 in 2000 and the state ranked thirteenth (in size) among all the states. It ranked third in population living in urban areas and third in per capita income. The state ranked third in population density, and second in the percentage of foreign-born residents. It ranked eighth in the number of undocumented (illegal) immigrants. African Americans constituted 5.4 percent of the state's population and included large numbers from the Carribean, including

French-speaking Haitians. Hispanics made up 6.8 percent, Asians 3.8 percent, and people of mixed race 2.3 percent of the state's population.

With a highly concentrated population, Massachusetts nonetheless developed an awkward division between a predominantly white, financially comfortable, highly educated population in urban and suburban areas, and a poor and less educated population in the older neighborhoods and in manufacturing cities and former mill towns. The continuation of this division may be one of the state's most significant social problems. Massachusetts has in effect two separate and unequal societies, one marked by people with excellent housing, schools, libraries, and hospitals, with modern office buildings and laboratories; and other communities plagued by poor housing, modest schools, and many of the economic and social problems that stem from poverty. The state ranks first in the percentage of the population possessing college degrees, first in attracting out-of-state students to its colleges and universities, second in state spending for the arts, and third in per capita library holdings. But it is fiftieth in per capita state spending for public higher education, thirty-seventh in state aid per pupil for elementary and secondary schools, and among youths joining the military, the state ranked thirty-fourth on scores in the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

History

The history of the Commonwealth can be divided into four periods: colonial, federal, industrial, and the present era, high technology and services.

The first successful English settlement north of Virginia was that of the Pilgrim Separatists, who had been religious refugees in Holland. Their party, consisting of 101 passengers, which included hired (non-Separatist) workmen, arrived at the site of Plymouth in late December 1620. The group was quartered on the anchored Mayflower during a hard winter in which half of their number died. In the spring they were joined by Squanto, an English-speaking Native American who had been a victim of Spanish slavers but was able to return to the site of his youth, where he found that his tribe had been wiped out by a plague. He joined the Pilgrims and taught them how to hunt, fish, and farm. He helped in the construction of Plymouth Plantation but died two years after joining the colony. After a supply ship arrived at Plymouth in 1621, the Pilgrims were able to trade with the Native Americans one hundred miles along the coastline.

The success of the Pilgrims encouraged other English settlers to visit, trade, and establish towns, and early trading posts and settlements were established at Salem, Weymouth, Wollaston, and Gloucester. The most important settlement came with the chartered Massachusetts Bay Company. Its first wave included 800 settlers together with livestock and building materials. These Puritans initially chose Charlestown as the site of their capital, but before a year passed they moved to the Shawmut peninsula, where a spring was found. If the Puritans had remained in Charlestown, situated at the junction of two rivers, with plenty of space and good overland routes to the interior, they would have engaged in agriculture, fishing, and timber harvesting, as well as trade. But the move to Boston on the small peninsula forced their colony to grow as a seaport and trading center.

This early Boston was a theocracy in which the ministers instructed the civil officers. Those like Anne Hutchinson, whose orthodoxy was questioned, were exiled, while troublesome Quakers like Anne Dyer were put to death. Literacy was important and a printing press was set up. Primary schools were followed by the founding of the Boston Latin School, and Harvard College one year later. Located at the midpoint of British North America, Boston became the region's largest city and chief transshipment point. The Congregational churches were self-governing and merchants overtook ministers as the leaders of the colony, yet church and state were unified until 1833, and in most towns the same buildings were used both for worship and for town meetings.

The cultural achievement of the Bay Colony was significant. Boston became a center of fine furniture production. John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart painted great portraits, and Paul Revere's silver bowls are widely admired. The Old State House, the Old North Church, the Old South Meeting House, the King's Chapel, Harvard's Massachusetts Hall, and Christ Church, Cambridge are exemplary and surviving works of architecture. Also important were the newspapers and pamphlets, which together with discussions in taverns, led to the coming of the American Revolution.

The Federal period was a time of great population growth and achievements in many fields. Shays' Rebellion (1786) was a result of a post–Revolutionary War recession. Many of the farmers in the Connecticut Valley were in debt and faced foreclosures of their properties. Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran, led an unsuccessful raid on the United States arsenal in Springfield in an attempt to arm the threatened farmers so that they could shut down the courthouses where foreclosures would take place, before the legislature could meet and enact a moratorium on foreclosures. The rebellion and the threat of a mortgage moratorium frightened well-to-do citizens throughout the nation; historians connect this rebellion with the calling of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which wrote the second (present) U.S. Constitution, which created a stronger central government and forbids the states from enacting laws impairing the obligations of contracts.

The land area of Boston grew through the filling-in of the peninsula's tidal basins. The top sixty feet of rock and soil of the steep Beacon Hill was leveled to create a site for the nation's oldest prestige neighborhood. The debris from this project was dumped into the millpond to create the West End. Later the South End, and still later the Back Bay, were graceful neighborhoods built on filled land.

Charles Bullfinch was the outstanding architect and developer of this period. His Tontine Crescent combined town houses with a public library. His New State House (1797), Massachusetts General Hospital (1823), the First Harrison Gray Otis House (1796), and his North Hanover Street Church (1804) are all on the National Registry of historic Places. Alexander Parris's Cathedral of Saint Paul (1820), Quincy Marketplace adjacent to Faneuil Hall (1826), and the Unitarian Church of the Presidents in Quincy are all noteworthy. Also important are the African Meeting House (1806), the first church and social center in the nation that a black community built for its own use, and the Abiel Smith School (1835), the first publicly supported school for black children. In 1855, the Legislature outlawed racial segregation in the public schools of the Commonwealth.

Massachusetts leadership in the antislavery movement was crucial. William Lloyd Garrison of Newbury-port founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Amos Adams Lawrence financed members of the anti-slavery movement who moved to Kansas in an attempt to bring that territory into the Union as a free state. Lawrence also financed John Brown, a Springfield woolen merchant, in his trips to Kansas, where five slavery advocates were put to death, and to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where a United States arsenal was attacked in 1859.

The creation of the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837, with Horace Mann as its leader, provided for publicly supported schools throughout the state, and two years later the nation's first public teachers' college was founded here. Mount Holyoke College, the nation's first women's college, was founded in 1837.

From 1845 to 1945 the United States became the greatest industrial, financial, and military power in the world, and in the first half of that period, New England, and especially Massachusetts, was the chief focus of these developments.

In 1813, in Waltham, the Boston Manufacturing Company built the first factory where raw cotton was processed into finished cloth in a single building. Four decades later, the Waltham Watch Company began the manufacture of machine-made watches, which prospered there for nine decades. The textile industry took a major step with the formation of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company and the establishment of Lowell as a company-owned, cotton-weaving town in 1822. Downstream, in 1845, Boston financiers founded Lawrence, which quickly became the nation's most important worsted (woolen) weaving center. The great Lawrence strike of 1912 was widely recognized as a major victory for the American working man. Brockton was the leading center for shoe manufacturing before the Civil War (1861–1865), and the site of an experimental electric streetcar line. Lynn was also a leading shoe-producing city, and it had General Electric's major engine facility. Worcester could boast of a variety of wire-making, metal machine tool, and shoe factories. The United States Armory at Springfield produced small arms for the military services for nearly eighteen decades until its closing in 1968. Its existence provided work for scores of metalworking and machine shops in Springfield and adjacent towns.

By the 1860s, two hundred mills, most situated at waterpower sites within a hundred miles of Boston, made Massachusetts the most important industrial state in the union. In the early decades of the twentieth century, General Electric was the state's largest industrial employer. Raytheon was the leader of the state's large electronics industry. This entry could be filled with a listing of American industries that had their beginnings or early expansion in the Commonwealth.

The decades following the Civil War were an era of accomplishment for the fine arts. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts built its first home at Copley Square, which opened to the public in 1876. The Worcester Art Museum dates from 1896. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, house magnificent personal art collections. Important art museums are found on the campuses of Harvard, Williams, Smith, and other colleges and universities in the state. The Boston Symphony was endowed in 1881 and its magnificent hall was opened in 1900. The Boston Public Library was the first of the large city libraries in the nation. Its McKim building, named for its architect, was opened in 1895 and remains one of the great treasure houses of the nation.

The first digital computer was built at Harvard University in 1944. Massachusetts is second only to California in the high-technology industry. More than 30,000 scientists and engineers, all with advanced degrees, live and work in the Boston region. Their efforts are matched by perhaps 60,000 technically trained blue-collar workers.

Immigration

Immigration, emigration, and social mobility have changed what was once called the tribal nature of the Common-wealth's social system. The historic enmity between wealthy Protestants of English ancestry and working-class Irish Catholics that existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is difficult to detect today. Relations among and between other immigrant groups are friendly and respectful. In 1975, the controversy over the busing of students to remedy racial segregation in the Boston public schools caused violence to occur in several blue-collar Irish-identified older neighborhoods and heightened tensions throughout the region. But the city and the state entered the twenty-first century with these tensions much reduced, if not entirely eliminated. The only evidence of racial negativism in the political sphere may be detected in the failure of the black and Hispanic populations to win citywide elections in Boston and Democratic Party nominations to county and statewide offices. Immigration during the last quarter of the twentieth century brought many new people from nations not previously settled here to the state and its cities and towns. The number of foreign-born residents rose from 573,733 in 1990 to 756,165 in 2000. (The economic prosperity of the 1990s may have played an important role here.)

Economics

Economic trends that began in the decades prior to World War II continued in the closing decades of the century. There was the almost complete displacement of the textile, garment, shoe, machinery, and food-processing industries. Over fishing is a major threat to the state's ocean fishing fleet. High costs associated with cold winters, lack of fossil fuels, failure to develop sustainable power sources, and a location distant from national markets and raw materials, together with unionized workers and a relatively high state minimum wage scale, made competition in manufacturing with Sunbelt states and the less industrialized nations difficult. The state's prosperity rests on its high-technology, electronics, investment (finance), higher education, medical research, and service industries, which replaced the older manufacturing industries.

During the recessions of the early 1970s and the late 1980s, state government was plagued by unbalanced budgets, high unemployment, and increases in public assistance spending. The recovery of the 1980s was called the "Massachusetts miracle." High technology took root in the 1960s and, supported by military research and breakthroughs in electronics and miniaturization, produced the economic turnaround. Expansion of architecture and engineering firms, centers for medical treatment and research, and graduate and professional education also were important. Within the post-1960 economic revival, unemployment soared to 11.2 percent in 1975 but dropped to 3.2 percent in 1987. During the 1990s, unemployment ranged from 9.6 percent in 1991 to 2.5 percent in 2000.

Important to the economic revival was the scientific and technologic excellence of the state's research universities, especially the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. Government-sponsored research conducted here during World War II and the Cold War decades produced many military breakthroughs, some with civilian applications. Another factor was the region's skilled manpower, especially in machine tools, which provided an abundance of trained technicians. Massachusetts has entered the twenty-first century with several other strong and large research universities moving into positions of national prominence. Included here are Boston University and Boston College, whose assets exceed $1 billion each. Northeastern University has pioneered in placing its students in a vast array of work experiences. Important smaller research universities include Tufts in Medford and Somerville, Brandeis in Waltham, and Clark and Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester. Also significant is the five-campus University of massachusetts system that includes a large graduate school in Amherst and a medical school in Worcester.

Office and hotel construction in Boston and elsewhere in the state was meager in the decades between 1920 and 1960, but in response to the business revival after 1960 many office, apartment, and hotel towers were built in Boston, and were matched by numerous office buildings, factories, laboratories, warehouses, hotels, and shopping malls erected at almost every interchange of the Boston region's pioneering circumferential highway, Route 128. The area adjacent to this highway, west of the research universities in Cambridge, contains one of the nation's most important concentrations of high-technology industries. Within the city of Boston, Mayor John Collins (1960–1968) and redevelopment director Edward Logue pursued one of the largest and boldest redevelopment programs in the nation, which focused on both the city's business and government office building centers and a cross-section of older neighborhoods.

Transportation

Prior to the 1970s the state government may have been antiquated, burdened by patronage, and unable to plan and coordinate continued economic development, but in the last three decades of the twentieth century there were several notable achievements. The Massachusetts Port Authority expanded and modernized Boston's Logan Airport, the eighth largest in the nation in terms of the number of passengers served. In 1970 Governor Francis Sargent, in a prophetic move, declared a moratorium on highway construction within the Route 128 perimeter. Two years later, the Boston Transportation Planning Review proposed major extensions and improvements of the region's rail-oriented Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, including both the rapid transit system serving Boston and its immediate suburbs, and the region's commuter rail system. Entering the twenty-first century, the rapid transit system's four major lines carried 250,000 passengers on the average workday. The bus system carried 170,000 passengers, commuter rail lines carried 33,000 passengers, and commuter boats carried 2,000. (These figures assume that passengers take two trips each day.)

The decade of the 1990s witnessed the restoration of the Old Colony commuter rail line serving suburban communities south of Boston. The region's first "busway" (highway lanes and paved transit tunnels built to accommodate certain types of buses) will serve a corridor in one of Boston's oldest residential neighborhoods, the new U.S. courthouse, and a planned business, hotel, and convention area in the South Boston waterfront, and is scheduled for completion in 2003. Planning is under way for a circumferential transit ring, approximately two miles from the business core, which will connect several low-income neighborhoods to two major medical centers, the airport, and declining warehouse and industrial areas. This wealth of public transportation facilities serves to preserve the historic and business areas of Boston as perhaps the most walk-friendly city center in the nation.

Boston's Central Artery and Tunnel project, a ghost of the 1950s automobile-oriented highway mind-set, is scheduled for completion in 2005, and is expected to cost nearly $15 billion, making it the nation's most expensive highway project. Called "The Big Dig," it includes replacing an elevated expressway with an eight-lane underground roadway, the world's widest bridge to carry traffic across the Charles River, a four-lane harbor tunnel connecting the downtown with the airport, and a vast amount of highway spaghetti providing links to all the downtown area's highways and expressways. A significant failure of this project is the lack of a one-mile rail link between the city's two major rail terminals. This causes passengers from Maine and the New Hampshire coastal towns to have to take a taxi or a complicated transit trip If they intend to proceed by rail south or west of Boston.

Politics

Massachusetts voters may be the most liberal in the nation. Democratic presidential candidates carry the state by the widest margins, or lose it by the narrowest margins, in the nation. The state's delegation in Congress is entirely composed of liberal Democrats. Democrats control both houses of the legislature with overwhelming majorities. Michael Dukakis, a Democrat, was the only governor to serve more than seven years. He served three full four-year terms. Democrats also have had success in winning election to the state's four lesser constitutional offices (attorney general, treasurer, auditor, and secretary of state). But Republicans and conservative Democrats had remarkable success in winning the governorship during the last quarter of the century. In 1978 a conservative Democrat, Edward J. King, was elected governor, and in 1990 a moderate Republican, William Weld, was elected over a conservative Democrat, John Silber. Weld was reelected in 1994, but chose not to serve his full second term. In 1998, his successor, Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci, was elected to a full term, but when nominated to be ambassador to Canada, he vacated the governorship to his lieutenant governor, Jane Swift, who assumed office at age thirty-six, making her the youngest woman ever to serve as one of the nation's governors. Upon leaving office, both King and Weld have pursued their careers out-side of the state.

Massachusetts's political party organizations may be among the weakest in the nation. On even-numbered years the use of the office block form, which scatters party nominees almost at random across the ballot, weakens party awareness. Nonpartisan local elections deprive party organizations of needed exercise during odd-numbered years, when local officials are elected. In 2000, 36 percent of voters were enrolled Democrats, 14 percent were enrolled Republicans, and 50 percent chose not to enroll in either party. Almost all candidates in both partisan and nonpartisan elections must build personal political organizations for raising campaign funds and for getting out the vote on Election Day. In a referendum in 1998 the voters, by a two-thirds margin, enacted a system of state-financed election campaigns, but the legislature has failed to provide funds for the system, and the issue is being argued in the state courts.

Culture and the Arts

Massachusetts is the home of an unrivaled array of cultural and educational institutions. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is admired around the world. In addition to its traditional season of concerts in Symphony Hall, its summer activities include the Boston Pops, free concerts on the Esplanade, and Tanglewood, its vacation home in the Berkshires. The state has other magnificent music halls and conservatories. Down the street from the Symphony is Berklee, the only four-year college in the nation devoted solely to jazz and contemporary popular music. In the field of the visual arts, the collections and galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts rival the world's greatest museums, but the state also has major collections of art displayed in magnificent buildings in Worcester, Williams-town, Salem, North Adams, and at several sites on the Harvard campus in Cambridge. Smith and Wellesley Colleges have important fine arts museums on their campuses. Boston's outstanding Children's Museum shares a former warehouse with the Computer Museum. Brookline is the host to a museum of transportation, and New Bedford has its whaling museum. The large and popular Museum of Science is located adjacent to a dam on the Charles River. Harvard has several important science museums and is most famous for its collection of glass flowers.

Land and Conservation

From the Berkshires to Cape Cod, Massachusetts is a place of natural beauty, and the need to safeguard this resource for healthy environments and spiritual delights is well understood. Boston's historic Common may be the nation's oldest public park. All levels of government and a variety of citizens' organizations share in protecting the Commonwealth's lands and waters. The National Park Service maintains fourteen parks and historical sites in Massachusetts, including the Cape Cod National Seashore. The state system of parks and forests consists of 170 properties (298,000 acres). The Boston Metropolitan Park System, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot, is known as the Emerald Necklace and comprises 20,000 acres of parks, woodlands, wetlands, and beaches, and 162 miles of landscaped parkways, all located within fifteen miles of the statehouse in Boston.

The Trustees of Reservations was organized by private parties to protect the Massachusetts landscape in 1891. It owns 91 reservations (22,545 acres) that are open to the public, and it protects 202 additional properties (13,314 acres) with conservation restrictions. Massachusetts Audubon (independent of the national organization) owns 60 sanctuaries (25,794 acres). The Charles River Watershed Association, supported by membership contributions of 5,200 individuals and organizations, serves as a guardian of this valued resource. No other citizens' group focused on a river valley has attracted and held the support of so many dues-paying people. Massachusetts is first among the states in the number of local and regional conservation land trusts. These include 143 trusts, which own and protect 210,000 scenic acres.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bluestone, Barry, and Mary Huff Stevenson. The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in an American Metropolis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000.

Dukakis, Michael S., and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Creating theFuture: The Massachusetts Comeback and Its Promise for America. New York: Summit Books, 1988.

Encyclopedia of Massachusetts, Biographical—Genealogical. New York: The American Historical Society, 1984.

Hovey, Kendra A., and Howard A. Hovey. CQ's State Fact Finder2000: Rankings Across America Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Books, 2000.

Keating, Raymond J., and Thomas Keating. US by the Numbers: Figuring What's Left, Right, and Wrong with America State by State. Sterling, Va.: Capital Books, 2000.

Kennedy, Lawrence W. Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since1630. Amherst: University of massachusetts Press, 1992.

Lampe, David, ed. The Massachusetts Miracle: High Technology andEconomic Revitalization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.

Lukas, J. Anthony. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in theLives of Three American Families. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Rand, Christopher. Cambridge, USA: Hub of a New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

RogerFeinstein

Massachusetts , most populous of the New England states of the NE United States. It is bordered by New York (W), Vermont and New Hampshire (N), the Atlantic Ocean (E), and Rhode Island and Connecticut (S).

Facts and Figures

Area, 8,257 sq mi (21,386 sq km). Pop. (2000) 6,349,097, a 5.5% increase since the 1990 census. Capital and largest city, Boston. Statehood, Feb. 6, 1788 (6th of the original 13 states to ratify the Constitution). Highest pt., Mt. Greylock, 3,491 ft (1,065 m); lowest pt., sea level. Nickname, Bay State. Motto,Ense Petit Placidam Sub Libertate Quietem [By the Sword We Seek Peace, But Peace Only under Liberty]. State bird, chickadee. State flower, mayflower. State tree, American elm. Abbr., Mass.; MA

Geography

The eastern part of the commonwealth (its official designation), including the Cape Cod peninsula and the islands lying off it to the south—the Elizabeth Islands , Martha's Vineyard , and Nantucket —is a low coastal plain. In this area short, swift rivers such as the Merrimack have long supplied industry with power, and an indented coastline provides many good natural harbors, with Boston a major U.S. port. In the interior rise uplands separated by the rich Connecticut River valley, and farther west lies the Berkshire valley, surrounded by the Berkshire Hills, part of the Taconic Mts. The western streams feed both the Hudson and the Housatonic rivers. The state has a mean altitude of c.500 ft (150 m), and Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires is the highest point (3,491 ft/1,064 m). The climate is variable.

Boston is the capital and largest city. Other important cities include Worcester , Springfield , Lowell , New Bedford , Cambridge , Brockton , Fall River , and Quincy . The state is famed for its historic points of interest, among them being those at Concord and Lexington; at three national historical parks—Boston, Lowell, and Minute Man; and at eight national historic sites—Adams, Boston African American, Frederick Law Olmsted, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Longfellow, Salem Maritime, Saugus Iron Works, and Springfield Armory (see National Parks and Monuments , table). Cultural attractions include the noted Tanglewood Music Festival and the many educational facilities of the state.

As a recreation and vacation land, Massachusetts has great stretches of seashore in the east and many lakes and streams in the wooded Berkshire Hills in the west. There are numerous state parks, forests, and beaches, and Cape Cod is the site of a national seashore. Provincetown, on Cape Cod, and Rockport, on Cape Ann, are artist colonies; Marblehead is a noted yachting center.

Economy

Massachusetts is traditionally industrial, and, with its predominantly urban population, is one of the most densely settled states in the nation. Its many, diverse manufactures include electrical and electronic equipment, industrial equipment, technical instruments, plastic products, paper and paper products, machinery, tools, and metal and rubber products. Shipping, printing, and publishing are also important, and the jewelry industry dates from before the American Revolution.

Leading agricultural products include cranberries, greenhouse and nursery items, apples, and milk and other dairy goods. Commercial fishing, chiefly from Gloucester and New Bedford, and shellfishing have declined in recent years. Lime, clay, sand, gravel, and stone dominate the state's small mineral output.

High-technology research and development, finance, and trade are all prominent in the commonwealth's economy. The service sector, in which tourism is primary, now employs over one third of Massachusetts workers.

Government, Politics, and Higher Education

The governor of Massachusetts is elected for a four-year term. The legislature (the General Court) has a senate of 40 members and a house of representatives with 160 members, all of whom serve two-year terms. Massachusetts sends 10 representatives and 2 senators to the U.S. Congress and has 12 electoral votes. The state is predominantly Democratic, but from 1991 it had only Republican governors—William Weld (1991–97), Paul Cellucci (1997–2001), Jane Swift (2001–3), and Mitt Romney (2003–7)—until Democrat Deval Patrick , the first African American to be elected governor of Massachusetts, won the post in 2006. Patrick was reelected in 2010.

Massachusetts is historically the capital of American higher education. Besides Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Cambridge, noted institutions include Amherst College, at Amherst; the Univ. of Massachusetts, at Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell, and Worcester; Boston College, at Chestnut Hill; Boston Univ., Simmons College, and Northeastern Univ., at Boston; Brandeis Univ., at Waltham; Clark Univ., College of the Holy Cross, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, at Worcester; Mount Holyoke College, at South Hadley; Smith College, at Northampton; Tufts Univ., at Medford; Wellesley College, at Wellesley; Wheaton College, at Norton; Williams College, at Williamstown; and the nine institutions of the Massachusetts State Colleges. The state is also renowned for its private secondary schools, such as Phillips Academy (Andover) and for research centers such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, at Falmouth.

History

Early European Exploration and Colonization

The coast of what is now Massachusetts was probably skirted by Norsemen in the 11th cent., and Europeans of various nationalities (but mostly English) sailed offshore in the late 16th and early 17th cent. Settlement began when the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed (1620) at a point they named Plymouth (for their port of embarkation in England). Their first governor, John Carver, died the next year, but under his successor, William Bradford, the Plymouth Colony took firm hold. Weathering early difficulties, the colony eventually prospered.

Other Englishmen soon established fishing and trading posts nearby—Andrew Weston (1622) at Wessagusset (now Weymouth) and Thomas Wollaston (1625) at Mt. Wollaston, which was renamed Merry Mount (now Quincy ) when Thomas Morton took charge. The fishing post established (1623) on Cape Ann by Roger Conant failed, but in 1626 he founded Naumkeag ( Salem ), which in 1628 became the nucleus of a Puritan colony led by John Endecott of the New England Company and chartered by the private Council for New England.

The Puritan Colonies

In 1629 the New England Company was reorganized as the Massachusetts Bay Company after receiving a more secure patent from the crown. In 1630 John Winthrop led the first large Puritan migration from England (900 settlers on 11 ships). Boston supplanted Salem as capital of the colony, and Winthrop replaced Endecott as governor. After some initial adjustments to allow greater popular participation and the representation of outlying settlements in the General Court (consisting of a governor, deputy governor, assistants, and deputies), the "Bay Colony" continued to be governed as a private company for the next 50 years. It was also a thoroughgoing Puritan theocracy (see Puritanism ), in which clergymen such as John Cotton enjoyed great political influence. The status of freeman was restricted (until 1664) to church members, and the state was regarded as an agency of God's will on earth. Due to a steady stream of newcomers from England, the South Shore (i.e., S of Boston), the North Shore, and the interior were soon dotted with firmly rooted communities.

The early Puritans were primarily agricultural people, although a merchant class soon formed. Most of the inhabitants lived in villages, beyond which lay their privately owned fields. The typical village was composed of houses (also individually owned) grouped around the common—a plot of land held in common by the community. The dominant structure on the common was the meetinghouse, where the pastor, the most important figure in the community, held long Sabbath services. The meetinghouse of the chief village of a town (in New England a town corresponds to what is usually called a township elsewhere in the United States) was also the site of the town meeting, traditionally regarded as a foundation of American democracy. In practice the town meeting served less to advance democracy than to enforce unanimity and conformity, and participation was as a rule restricted to male property holders who were also church members.

Because they were eager for everyone to have the ability to study scripture and always insisted on a learned ministry, the Puritans zealously promoted the development of educational facilities. The Boston Latin School was founded in 1635, one year before Harvard was established, and in 1647 a law was passed requiring elementary schools in towns of 50 or more families. These were not free schools, but they were open to all and are considered the beginning of popular education in the United States.

Native American resentment of the Puritan presence resulted in the Pequot War (see Pequot ) of 1637, after which the four Puritan colonies (Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven) formed the New England Confederation , the first voluntary union of American colonies. In 1675–76, the confederation broke the power of the Native Americans of southern New England in King Philip's War . In the course of the French and Indian Wars , however, frontier settlements such as Deerfield were devastated.

The population of the Massachusetts Bay Colony naturally rejoiced at the triumph of the Puritan Revolution in England, but with the restoration of Charles II in 1660 the colony's happy prospects faded. Its recently extended jurisdiction over Maine was for a time discounted by royal authority, and, worse still, its charter was revoked in 1684. The withdrawal of the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had long been expected because the colony had consistently violated the terms of the charter and repeatedly evaded or ignored royal orders by operating an illegal mint, establishing religious rather than property qualifications for suffrage, and discriminating against Anglicans.

A New Royal Colony

In 1691 a new charter united Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Maine into the single royal colony of Massachusetts. This charter abolished church membership as a test for voting, although Congregationalism remained the established religion. Widespread anxiety over loss of the original charter contributed to the witchcraft panic that reached its climax in Salem in the summer of 1692. Nineteen persons were hanged and one crushed to death for refusing to confess to the practice of witchcraft. The Salem trials ended abruptly when colonial authorities, led by Cotton Mather , became alarmed at their excesses.

By the mid-18th cent. the Massachusetts colony had come a long way from its humble agricultural beginnings. Fish, lumber, and farm products were exported in a lively trade carried by ships built in Massachusetts and manned by local seamen. That the menace of French Canada was removed by 1763 was due in no small measure to the unstinting efforts of England, but the increasing British tendency to regulate colonial affairs, especially trade (see Navigation Acts ), without colonial advice, was most unwelcome. Because of the colony's extensive shipping interests, e.g., the traffic in molasses, rum, and slaves (the "triangular trade" ), it sorely felt these restrictions.

Discontent and Revolution

In 1761 James Otis opposed a Massachusetts superior court's issuance of writs of assistance (general search warrants to aid customs officers in enforcing collection of duties on imported sugar), arguing that this action violated the natural rights of Englishmen and was therefore void. He thus helped set the stage for the political controversy which, coupled with economic grievances, culminated in the American Revolution . In Massachusetts a bitter struggle developed between the governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and the anti-British party in the legislature led by Samuel Adams, John Adams, James Otis, and John Hancock. The Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend Acts (1767) preceded the Boston Massacre (1770), and the Tea Act (1773) brought on the Boston Tea Party . The rebellious colonials were punished for this with the Intolerable Acts (1774), which troops under Gen. Thomas Gage were sent to enforce.

Through committees of correspondence Massachusetts and the other colonies had been sharing their grievances, and in 1774 they called the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia for united action. The mounting tension in Massachusetts exploded in Apr., 1775, when General Gage decided to make a show of force. Warned by Paul Revere and William Dawes, the Massachusetts militia engaged the British force at Lexington and Concord (see Lexington and Concord, battles of ). Patriot militia from other colonies hurried to Massachusetts, where, after the battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), George Washington took command of the patriot forces.

The British remained in Boston until Mar. 17, 1776, when Gen. William Howe evacuated the town, taking with him a considerable number of Tories. British troops never returned, but Massachusetts soldiers were kept busy elsewhere fighting for the independence of the colonies. In 1780 a new constitution, drafted by a constitutional convention under the leadership of John Adams, was ratified by direct vote of the citizenry.

The New Nation

Victorious in the Revolution, the colonies faced depressing economic conditions. Nowhere were those conditions worse than in W Massachusetts, where discontented Berkshire farmers erupted in Shays's Rebellion in 1786. The uprising was promptly quelled, but it frightened conservatives into support of a new national constitution that would displace the weak government created under the Articles of Confederation; this constitution was ratified by Massachusetts in 1788.

Independence had closed the old trade routes within the British Empire, but new ones were soon created, and trade with China became especially lucrative. Boston and lesser ports boomed, and the prosperous times were reflected politically in the commonwealth's unwavering adherence to the Federalist party, the party of the dominant commercial class. European wars at the beginning of the 19th cent. at first further stimulated maritime trade but then led to interference with American shipping. To avoid war Congress resorted to Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807 , but its provisions dealt a severe blow to the economy of Massachusetts and the rest of the nation.

War with Great Britain came anyway in 1812, and it was extremely unpopular in New England. There was talk of secession at the abortive Hartford Convention of New England Federalists, over which George Cabot presided. As it happened, however, the embargo and the War of 1812 had an unexpectedly favorable effect on the economy of Massachusetts. With English manufactured goods shut out, the United States had to begin manufacturing on its own, and the infant industries that sprang up after 1807 tended to concentrate in New England, and especially in Massachusetts. These industries, financed by money made in shipping and shielded from foreign competition by protective tariffs after 1816, grew rapidly, transforming the character of the commonwealth and its people.

Labor was plentiful and often ruthlessly exploited. The power loom, perfected by Francis Cabot Lowell , as well as English techniques for textile manufacturing (based on plans smuggled out of England) made Massachusetts an early center of the American textile industry. The water power of the Merrimack River became the basis for Lowell's cotton textile industry in the 1820s. The manufacture of shoes and leather goods also became important in the state. Agriculture, on the other hand, went into a sharp decline because Massachusetts could not compete with the new agricultural states of the West, a region more readily accessible after the opening of the Erie Canal (1825). Farms were abandoned by the score; some farmers turned to work in the new factories, others moved to the West.

In 1820 Maine was separated from Massachusetts and admitted to the Union as a separate state under the terms of the Missouri Compromise . In the same year the Massachusetts constitution was considerably liberalized by the adoption of amendments that abolished all property qualifications for voting, provided for the incorporation of cities, and removed religious tests for officeholders. (Massachusetts is the only one of the original 13 states that is still governed under its original constitution, the one of 1780, although this was extensively amended by the constitutional convention of 1917–19.)

Reform Movements and Civil War

In the 1830s and 40s the state became the center of religious and social reform movements, such as Unitarianism and transcendentalism . Of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau were quick to perceive and decry the evils of industrialization, while Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson had some association with Brook Farm , an outgrowth of Utopian ideals. Horace Mann set about establishing an enduring system of public education in the 1830s. During this period Massachusetts gave to the nation the architect Charles Bulfinch; such writers and poets as Richard Henry Dana, Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier; the historians George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, Francis Parkman, and William Hickling Prescott; and the scientist Louis Agassiz.

In the 1830s reformers began to devote energy to the antislavery crusade (see abolitionists ). This was regarded with great displeasure by the mill tycoons, who feared that an offended South would cut off their cotton supply. The Whig party split on the slavery issue, and Massachusetts turned to the new Republican party, voting for John C. Frémont in 1856 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Massachusetts was the first state to answer Lincoln's call for troops after the firing on Fort Sumter. Massachusetts soldiers were the first to die for the Union cause when the 6th Massachusetts Regiment was fired on by a secessionist mob in Baltimore. In the course of the war over 130,000 men from the state served in the Union forces.

Industrialization and Immigration

After the Civil War Massachusetts, with other northern states, experienced rapid industrial expansion. Massachusetts capital financed many of the nation's new railroads, especially in the West. Although people continued to leave the state for the West, labor remained cheap and plentiful as European immigrants streamed into the state. The Irish, oppressed by both nature and the British, began arriving in droves even before the Civil War (beginning in the 1840s), and they continued to land in Boston for years to come. After them came French Canadians, arriving later in the 19th cent., and, in the early 20th cent., Portuguese, Italians, Poles, Slavs, Russian Jews, and Scandinavians. Also from the British Isles came the English, the Scots, and the Welsh. Of all the immigrant groups, English-speaking and non-English-speaking, the Irish came to be the most influential, especially in politics. Their religion (Roman Catholic) and their political faith (Democratic) definitely set them apart from the old native Yankee stock.

Practically all the immigrants went to work in the factories. The halcyon days of shipping were over. The maritime trade had bounded back triumphantly after the War of 1812, but the supplanting of sail by steam, the growth of railroads, and the destruction caused by Confederate cruisers in the Civil War helped reduce shipping to its present negligible state—a far cry from the colorful era of the clipper ships, which were perfected by Donald McKay of Boston. Whaling, once the glory of New Bedford and Nantucket, faded quickly with the introduction of petroleum.

The Growth of the Cities and the Labor Movement

The rise of industrialism was accompanied by a growth of cities, although the small mill town, where the factory hands lived in company houses and traded in the company store, remained important. Labor unions struggled for recognition in a long, weary battle marked by strikes, sometimes violent, as was the case in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912.

World War I, which caused a vast increase in industrial production, improved the lot of workers, but not of Boston policemen, who staged and lost their famous strike in 1919. For his part in breaking the strike, Gov. Calvin Coolidge won national fame and went on to become vice president and then president, the third Massachusetts citizen (after John Adams and John Quincy Adams) to hold the highest office in the land. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case , following the police strike, attracted international attention, as liberals raged over the seeming lack of regard for the spirit of the law in a state that had given the nation such an eminent jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935). Labor unions finally came into their own in the 1930s under the New Deal.

World War II to the Present

Industry spurted forward again during World War II, and in the postwar era the state continued to develop. Politically, the state again assumed national importance with the 1960 election of Senator John F. Kennedy as the nation's 35th President. In 1974, Michael S. Dukakis, a Democrat, was elected governor. He lost to Edward King in 1978, but won again in 1982 and was reelected in 1986. In 1988 he ran for president, losing to George H. W. Bush. Dukakis decided not to run again for governor.

During the postwar period the decline of textile manufacturing was offset as the electronics industry, attracted by the skilled technicians available in the Boston area, boomed along Route 128. Growth in the computer and electronics sectors, much of it spurred by defense spending, helped Massachusetts prosper during much of the 1980s. At the end of the decade effects of a nationwide recession and the burden of a huge state budget hit Massachusetts hard, but in the 1990s there was a substantial economic recovery, spearheaded by growth in small high-tech companies.

Bibliography

See A. B. Hart, ed., Commonwealth History of Massachusetts (5 vol., 1927–30, repr. 1966); C. Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (1969); G. Lewis, The Encyclopedia of Massachusetts (1984); M. Kaufman et al., A Guide to the History of Massachusetts (1988); G. Orcutt, Massachusetts (2 vol., 1988); R. Wilkie and J. Tager, ed., Historical Atlas of Massachusetts (1991).

Massachusetts, USA A state, officially called the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The name comes from the Massachuset, Algonquian‐speaking Native Americans whose name is derived from massadchseuck ‘(People who live) near the Great Hills’. During the 17th century the modern state was composed of Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620, and Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by Puritan colonists. It joined the Union as the 6th state in 1788.

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