History of Boston

The city quickly became the political, commercial, financial, religious and educational center of Puritan New England and grew to play a central role in the history of the United States.

Along with New York, Boston became the financial center of the United States in the 19th century, and the large amount of capital available for investment there was crucial in funding the expansion of a nationwide railroad.

By the early 21st century the city's economy recovered, moving from an industrial base to one centered on education, medicine, and high technology, especially biotechnology startups.

Game was most easily hunted inland during bare-tree seasons while the fishing shoals and shellfish beds on the tidal flats of Boston harbor were more comfortably exploited during the summer months.

Knowing of this difficulty, Blaxton wrote an historic letter in September 1630 to Johnson and his group of Puritans that advertised Boston's excellent natural spring, and invited them to settle on his land.

The name of the English city ultimately derives from that town's patron saint, St. Botolph, in whose church John Cotton served as the rector until his emigration with Johnson.

Governor Winthrop, Johnson's successor as leader of the settlement, purchased the land through a one-time tax on Boston residents of 6 shillings (around $50 adjusted) per head.

[11][15][16][17] After Johnson's death the Episcopalian Blaxton did not get along with the Puritan leaders of the Boston church, which rapidly became radically fundamentalist in its outlook as it began executing religious dissidents such as Quakers.

[17][19][20][21] In 1684, fearing that the rumored revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Charter by King Charles II would come to pass, Boston city fathers sought to buttress their fifty year old claim to the land of the Shawmut Peninsula.

This influenced every facet of Boston life, and made it imperative that colonists legislate morality as well as enforce marriage, church attendance, education in the Word of God, and the persecution of sinners.

In the fall of 1767 he warned about a possible insurrection in Boston any day, and his exaggerated report of one disturbance in 1768, "certainly had given Lord Hillsboro the impression that troops were the only way to enforce obedience in the town."

By the late 1760s, Patriot colonists focused on the rights of Englishmen that they claimed to hold, especially the principle of "no taxation without representation" as articulated by John Rowe, James Otis Sr., Samuel Adams and other Boston firebrands.

On March 5, 1770, nine soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot opened fire at a crowd of Bostonians which was verbally and physically harassing them; five people were killed in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre, dramatically escalating tensions.

[38] The Sons of Liberty decided to take action to defy Britain's new tax on tea, but the British government retaliated with a series of punitive laws, closing down the Port of Boston and stripping Massachusetts of its self-government.

Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Dr. Samuel Prescott made their famous midnight rides to alert the Minutemen in the surrounding towns, who fought the resulting Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

Boston was transformed from a relatively small and economically stagnant town in 1780 to a bustling seaport and cosmopolitan center with a large and highly mobile population by 1800.

A network of small rivers bordering the city and connecting it to the surrounding region made for easy shipment of goods and allowed for a proliferation of mills and factories.

The term was coined in 1861 by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.[59] The Brahmin had high expectations to meet: to cultivate the arts, support charities such as hospitals and colleges, and assume the role of community leader.

After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Boston also became the hub of efforts to send anti-slavery New Englanders to settle in Kansas Territory through the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company.

The Puritan leaders initially sent the Ulster Irish to the fringes of the Bay Colony, where they settled places like Belfast, Maine, Londonderry and Derry, New Hampshire, and Worcester, Massachusetts.

[63] Nonetheless, as in New York City, on July 14, 1863, a draft riot attempting to raid Union armories broke out among Irish Catholics in the North End, resulting in approximately 8 to 14 deaths.

Literary residents included, among many others, writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and Julia Ward Howe, as well as historians John Lothrop Motley, John Gorham Palfrey, George Bancroft, William Hickling Prescott, Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, James Ford Rhodes, Edward Channing and Samuel Eliot Morison.

She worked to replace 37-year-old textbooks, to protect the claims of local Boston women for career opportunities in the school system, and to propose a degree-granting teachers college.

Twenty-one people were killed and 150 injured as an immense wave of molasses, which rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 km/h), crushed and asphyxiated many of the victims to death.

"Charles Ponzi, a dapper, five-foot-two-inch rogue who in 1920 raked in an estimated $15 million in eight months by persuading tens of thousands of Bostonians that he had unlocked the secret to easy wealth.

In their places went a new headquarters for the Boston Herald, the Charles River Park apartment complex, additions to Massachusetts General Hospital, and Government Center.

In 1984, the city of Boston gave control of the complex to a private developer, Corcoran-Mullins-Jennison, who re-developed and re-vitalised the property into a residential mixed-income community called Harbor Point Apartments.

With construction beginning in 1991, the Big Dig moved the remainder of the Central Artery underground, widened the north–south highway, and created local bypasses to prevent east–west traffic from contributing to congestion.

Beginning in 1807, the crown of Beacon Hill was used to fill in a 50-acre (20 ha) mill pond that later became the Bulfinch Triangle (just south of today's North Station area).

Almost six hundred acres (240 hectares) of brackish Charles River marshlands west of the Boston Common were filled in with gravel brought in by rail from the hills of Needham Heights.