Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

“Boston”

                                                                 James C. O’Connell, Ph.D.                                                                                                                       City Planning-Urban Affairs Program                                                                                                                             Boston University

This is a draft of an article that has been published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History–https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.1110.

Summary

Over its 400-year history, Boston has been an influential city in the development of the United States. It was the leading English North American seaport between 1630 and 1760. Its tensions with the British government in the 1760s and 1770s ignited the war for American independence. During much of the nineteenth century the port of Boston was second only to New York. Merchants used profits from maritime trade, especially with China, to invest in textile mills, which spurred the American Industrial Revolution. During the antebellum era, Boston emerged as the country’s intellectual capital, led by the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau and a variety of reform movements. Its abolitionist movement helped provoke the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks. Between 1865 and World War I, the thriving industrial economy of Boston and New England attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants, who created a more factious, pluralistic community. From the 1920s, as the textile and shoe industries relocated to Southern non-union states, Boston lost population and economic advantage to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. By the 1950s, Boston was considered an urban basket case, but the city embarked upon a decades-long effort to reinvent itself. Its economy gradually shifted to the defense industry and advanced technology. Prominent urban revitalization projects started in the 1960s and 1970s with Government Center and the redevelopment of Faneuil Hall Marketplace. During this time, Boston was engulfed in racial strife, as evidenced by the tensions over court-ordered busing to end school segregation. By the early twenty-first century, Boston, led by MIT faculty and graduates, became a global center for technological innovation and the leading center for life sciences. In the meantime, Boston has become one of the most economically-unequal cities in the country, with large numbers of well-compensated professionals and technologists and a larger number of lower-income service workers.

The Settlement of Boston

Boston is situated on Massachusetts Bay, the largest and best-protected Atlantic harbor between Halifax, NS, and New York. Thirty-four islands dot the outer harbor. The larger area is a depression of land of about 500 square miles surrounded by a ridge of low hills. The first humans entered New England about 12,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age. By 1600, about 12,000 indigenous Massachusett people were inhabiting the area around Massachusetts Bay. Between 1616 and 1619, European diseases wiped out as many as 90% of those living there between.[1] English Puritans seeking the opportunity to worship freely sailed to New England in 1630, establishing Boston as their foundational community on the 1.2-square-mile Shawmut Peninsula. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop called the new settlement a “city upon a hill,” a religious model for English society. The Puritan mission was so compelling that 21,000 migrants flocked to Boston and Southern New England between 1630 and 1641.[2]                                                                                                                                         The Puritans were reformers seeking to “purify” the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices. They adopted a strict code of piety and morals. Hoping to achieve “election,” they maintained habits of hard work and enterprise, believing that success in their endeavors would signify their salvation. This mindset came to be known as the Puritan or Calvinist work ethic. Puritan communities, led by Boston, were centered around a parish, which was governed by its congregation, creating the framework for a Christian community. Lax British oversight allowed the Massachusetts Bay Colony to become essentially self-governing when the Puritans carried the royal charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint-stock company, with them instead of leaving it with corporators in London. Boston established a pattern for participatory local government by creating a town meeting to make decisions and electing officials to administer its affairs. The Puritans prioritized community and constraints on the individual as the best guarantee that citizens would live stable and orderly lives.[3] Intense debate over orthodox belief and practice led to dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson being banished; and Quakers were hanged on Boston Common.                                                                                                The Puritans prioritized education, since reading the Bible enabled a direct encounter with God’s word. They established Boston Latin School (1635) as America’s first public school and Harvard College (1636), in Cambridge, to train ministers. The New England Puritans became one of the world’s most literate societies.                                                                              During the 1630s and 1640s Puritan missionary John Eliot proselytized among surviving Indians, helping them establish their own Christian “praying towns” outside of Boston.  Somewhat stable relations between the colonists and the Indians were sundered during King Philip’s War (1675-1676). The growing English population was pushing onto Indian lands, causing increasing friction. Wampanoag chief Metacom (called King Philip by the English) led an Indian coalition to war with the English settlers. They attacked two-thirds of New England towns, but Metacom and his warriors eventually succumbed to English numbers and firepower. The war never threatened Boston, but the Puritans attacked the Christianized Indians and removed them to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where many died of exposure and starvation. Some survivors were released, while others were sold into slavery in the West Indies.[4] Several thousand Indians were killed in the war, their villages were destroyed, and the remaining Indians were pushed off their land. The war established an Anglo-American pattern of wars of conquest and displacement of Indian tribes.                                                                                                    Upon settling the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans needed to sustain themselves economically. New England was never able to grow a staple crop, so it developed a commercial economy that traded a range of products across the Atlantic world. Early exports included furs, fish, lumber, and salted meat. During the 1640s, Boston merchants started transporting food supplies to feed enslaved people growing sugar in the West Indies. In exchange, they received molasses, which they turned into a valuable export, rum. They shipped rum to England for manufactured products and to West Africa, where they traded for enslaved Africans, who were transported to Caribbean islands to work sugar plantations. These colonial shipping arrangements became known as the “triangle trade.”                                                                                                 As a leading entrepot in England’s mercantile empire, Boston became the largest town in the British colonies.[5]  Boston served as both the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (which included Maine) and the administrative and religious center for the New England Puritan commonwealth, which also encompassed Connecticut and New Hampshire. From 1,200 inhabitants in 1640, it grew to approximately 4,500 by 1680 and 12,000 by 1720, peaking in 1740 at 17,000. By 1760, Philadelphia and New York surpassed Boston in population and trade.

[Insert Figure 1: Boston Map, by John Bonner, 1722. Boston Public Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map Collection, https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:9s161f21f, no copyright or use restrictions.]

“The Cradle of Liberty”

During the colonial period, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became accustomed to self-government, although the Crown made intermittent efforts to direct local policy.[6] Bostonians took politics as seriously as religion, and they locked horns with Britain over taxation and representative government after the French & Indian War. Parliament sought to raise money to pay for costs related to the war by imposing duties on goods being exported to the colonies. When Boston proved uncooperative in paying taxes, circumventing them through smuggling, Britain, in 1768, sent troops to the city to enforce their collection. Tensions developed between the soldiers and the townspeople culminating in the Boston Massacre (1770), at which British soldiers shot and killed five Bostonians in a crowd that had been heckling the troops. This event spawned outrage across the colonies. It was followed by the Boston Tea Party (1773), at which the local Sons of Liberty threw a cargo of imported Chinese tea into the harbor, protesting Parliament’s tax on tea and the tea monopoly conferred on the British East India Company. The British government responded by closing the port of Boston, which ruined the city’s economy. British Royal Governor General Thomas Gage abolished the locally-elected legislature and assumed total authority. This spurred Massachusetts towns to elect a provincial Congress that met independently outside Boston. The provincial Congress worked with town militias to form an armed force ready to resist the Crown. It was led by patriots Samuel Adams and John Hancock.                                                                                                                                         By April, 1775, the occupying British troops set out to seize the military supplies local militias were storing in Concord, 20 miles west of the city. Armed encounters with militiamen at Lexington and Concord triggered the Revolutionary War. They hounded the British troops back to Boston, killing 73 and wounding 174 British soldiers. The first pitched battle took place two months later on Bunker Hill in Charlestown, across the harbor from Boston. Although British troops drove the New Englanders off the hill, the colonists proceeded to encircle the peninsula town with more than 15,000 troops drawn from across New England. The next month, General George Washington assumed command of the siege army at Cambridge on behalf of the Continental Congress. Washington secured cannons captured from the British Fort Ticonderoga in New York and placed them on Dorchester Heights in March, 1776. The artillery was capable of shelling Castle William, the fort guarding Boston Harbor. This forced out the British troops and local Loyalists on March 17, 1776, celebrated to this day as Evacuation Day. This event effectively ended British control over most of New England. Boston’s central role in the American Revolution has continued by be an essential part of the city’s identity. The Freedom Trail, which links 16 Revolutionary and Early National Era sites, is the foremost attraction for visitors to Boston.

Post-Revolution Economy

At the end of the American Revolution, Boston’s economy was devastated. Its trade started to rebound, and, by 1790, it had 18,320 people, compared with Philadelphia’s 42,520 and New York’s 33,131. Boston merchants, with neighboring Salem, opened up trade with China, India, Scandinavia, Russia, and Latin America. According to economist Edward Glaeser, Boston made itself “the capital of a vast maritime empire.”[7] The China trade, which traded such items as furs and opium for tea, silk, and porcelain, generated wealth that would enable Boston to become a leading financial center.                                                                                                                     The city’s business acumen, resourceful seafaring captains and workers, and advanced shipping supply and maintenance infrastructure enabled it to thrive as America’s second port to New York through the Civil War. Between 1821 and 1860, Boston handled 21.9% of U.S. foreign exports and 15.7% of imports.[8] Boston’s experience in commerce entailed the development of sophisticated business services, including banking, insurance, accounting, legal services, and business management. Boston prospered during the antebellum period, as its population grew from 43,298 in 1820 to 177,840 in 1860.                                                                               The city’s merchants started investing their capital in the nascent textile industry. Since Boston itself lacked waterpower to operate mills, Francis Cabot Lowell opened what was the first American textile factory to integrate mechanized spinning and weaving cloth (1814) on the Charles River in nearby Waltham. Nine years later, Boston-based investors built the first planned textile mill town in Lowell, on the Merrimack River. In the decades leading to the Civil War, New England mills relied on cotton provided by enslaved Black labor in the South. Boston capitalists, sometimes referred to as the Boston Associates, developed mill towns across New England, making it the country’s first industrialized region. At the same time, Boston became the wholesaling center of the shoe manufacturing industry emerging in its hinterland. The region was served by a rail network centered on Boston that was the densest in the country. The wealth generated by manufacturing made Boston one of the country’s most prosperous cities.

“The Athens of America”

As the new country sought to establish a distinctive national culture that reflected its democratic yearnings, Boston took the lead as the “Athens of America.” The sobriquet, which was coined by the editor of the North American Review William Tudor, was used to describe Boston’s commitment to learning and literature in the antebellum era. Harvard College played a crucial role in shaping an intelligentsia, which included some of America’s foremost writers as well as doctors, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, and women activists. To emulate the ancient Greek seat of learning, Bostonians established a private lending library called the Athenaeum (1807). During the 1820s, the Lyceum movement (referring to the place in Athens where Aristotle lectured) started in Massachusetts, where it sponsored lectures on a wide range of topics in communities across the country. In 1848, Boston established the first American free public library.[9]                                                                                                                                              Out of this milieu came the nation’s most influential literary scene. Starting in the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller spearheaded Transcendentalism, which was America’s first home-grown intellectual movement. Emerson’s 1837 “American Scholar” lecture declared this country’s independence from European models: “Our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.”[10] His essays on “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” became cornerstones of the movement, while Thoreau’s Walden described his deliberative two-year experience of self-reliance and nature beside Concord’s Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller edited the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial and advocated for women’s rights in her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Other acclaimed writers included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Although some believed that, after this generation’s passing, Boston’s literary culture faltered, Boston persisted as an influential center of thought through its distinguished colleges and cultural institutions.[11]             The same progressive impulses that motivated its writers also inspired a bevy of social reformers. In the 1820s and 1830s, upper class reformers introduced humane prison reforms designed to rehabilitate inmates. They also established “reform schools” to reclaim and educate delinquent youth. Horace Mann led the movement for universal, tax-supported public education. This system entailed professional teachers educated at normal schools and a standard grade-appropriate curriculum. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe pioneered the education of blind persons at the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Howe’s wife Julia Ward Howe was an avid abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Dorothea Dix advocated for sympathetic and scientific treatment of the mentally ill at state hospitals.                                                                                                                       Many Boston reformers supported the movement to abolish slavery in the Southern states. David Walker, a free Black man, published the first sustained call for abolishing slavery and achieving racial equality with An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829). It shocked Southerners and radicalized Northern anti-slavery activists. William Lloyd Garrison, who started publishing The Liberator in 1831, helped organize the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. Garrison attacked not only the institution of slavery but the U.S. Constitution, which enabled it. At the African Meeting House (1806), the oldest meetinghouse built for Blacks in America, William Lloyd Garrison and escaped slaves and Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman spoke at public meetings. Women’s rights advocate and prolific writer Lydia Maria Child called for outright emancipation in An Appeal in Favor of that Class of American Called Africans (1833). Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience (1849) described his refusal to pay the local poll tax and his subsequently jailing by explaining that he was opposed to federal efforts to protect slavery as well as the government’s prosecution of the Mexican-American War. Black activists living on the north slope of Beacon Hill used their houses as stations for sheltering escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. These sites are included on Boston’s Black Heritage Trail.                                                                                                              At first, abolition was considered a radical, fringe cause in Massachusetts. Textile mill owners, who depended upon slave-grown cotton, favored tolerant relations with the South. Abolitionist feelings intensified after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which required that slaves be returned to their owners even if they had escaped to a free state. When escaped slave Shadrach Minkins was captured and was to be returned to the South in 1851, a group of Black men led by Lewis Hayden rescued Minkins from U.S. marshals in the court room and spirited him away to freedom in Canada. Three years later, when  Anthony Burns was forcibly extradited from Boston back to captivity in the South, abolitionist feelings escalated. As Southerners pushed to extend slavery to new Western territories during the 1850s, New England’s anti-slavery sentiments increased, given voice by U.S. Senator Charles Sumner. Many began to feel as if the existing Union could no longer endure.[12]                                                                  When Southern States seceded, Massachusetts spearheaded support for the Union and freedom for enslaved Blacks. Massachusetts was the first state to send a volunteer regiment to defend Washington, DC, after the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. The 54^th Massachusetts Infantry, organized in Boston in 1863, was the first Union Army regiment consisting of Black soldiers (commanded by white officers). It gained fame from its attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor, demonstrating the bravery Black troops. After the war, Bostonians Charles Sumner and  abolitionist advocate Wendell Phillips played significant roles in promoting the rights of Blacks in Reconstruction and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

[Insert Figure 2: The Expulsion of Negroes and Abolitionists from the Tremont Temple Boston, illustration by Winslow Homer. Library of Congress, Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1860, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95502932/, no restrictions.]

The Industrial Economy and Technological Innovation

Because of a paucity of prime agricultural land and prized natural resources, Boston’s economy has always relied upon commerce, finance, and technological innovation. The textile mills in Waltham, Lowell, and elsewhere in New England became sites of mechanical invention. Shoe manufacturing also became a leading New England business sector. Industries spurred technological inventions. For example, mechanics William Otis and Elias Howe invented the steam-powered shovel (1836) and the sewing machine (1846) respectively. Boston acquired the reputation for being the leading center for scientific and electrical research in the country.[13] Teaching at Boston University, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 and used Boston as the launching pad for building telephone exchanges around the United States. In 1888, entrepreneur Henry Whitney starting turning Boston’s horse-drawn streetcars into the first fully electric-powered large-city streetcar system in the world. Constructing America’s first subway line (1897) was a key part of this endeavor.[14] Building on mechanical innovation, Greater Boston flourished as an industrial center between the Civil War and 1920, though it lost economic clout to New York and other industrial cities. This was the period when Boston experienced its greatest population growth, from 177,840 to 748,060 (this included annexation of neighboring communities). The 40 or so surrounding towns that made up the metropolitan area also swelled in size during this period.[15]

[Insert Figure 3: The Fort Point Channel industrial district thrived during the late 19^th and early 20th centuries. It served as the country’s foremost wool marketplace. Wikimedia Commons, photo by James Woodward, GNU Free Documentation License,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fort_Point_Channel_Historic_District_South_Boston_MA_03.jpg.%5D

Fundamental to Boston’s leadership in technology was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose faculty and graduates carried out research that supported economic development. During the 1920s, as the textile and shoe industries started to decline, MIT contracted with large corporations to perform research that could be applied in the marketplace. Engineering School Dean Vannevar Bush helped start Raytheon Corporation to manufacture electronics. During World War II, Raytheon manufactured radar equipment and, subsequently, developed sophisticated missile systems. Bush served as Director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, establishing a well-funded system of defense-related R&D that ultimately poured billions of dollars in funding into MIT and Massachusetts in general.                                   Electronics and computers became a critical sector for Greater Boston. Minicomputers, and Digital Equipment Corporation, in particular, led the revitalization of the region during the 1970s and 1980s known as the “Massachusetts Miracle.” Startup technology businesses were often supported by venture capital, a form of early funding that was pioneered at the American Research and Development Corporation in 1946 by leaders associated with MIT and Harvard Business School. The Internet also had its roots in Boston. The first, primitive version of the Internet—ARPANET (1969)— was developed by the local firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to connect U.S. Defense Department research labs. BBN researcher Ray Tomlinson invented email, using the @ sign, for sending messages across the ARPANET. The first “killer app” for computers was an electronic spreadsheet called Visicalc, developed in 1979 by MIT student Dan Bricklin.[16]

[Insert Figure 4: Stata Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2004, by Frank Gehry. Wikimedia Commons, photo by King of Hearts, GNU Free Documentation License,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stata_Center_MIT_October_2014.jpg.]

Boston and Cambridge became one of the world’s foremost centers for medical science and biotechnology, building on the first-rate local research hospitals. The record of medical breakthroughs has included the first use of anesthetic ether in surgery (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1846) and the first organ transplant, for a kidney (Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, 1954). The most important research in biotechnology has been mapping the genome, which was spearheaded by the Whitehead Institute between 1990 and 2003 and has been subsequently built upon by the Broad Institute as well. Biogen, established in 1978 by Nobel Prize winners Walter Gilbert (Harvard) and Philip Sharp (MIT), was the world’s first independent biopharmaceutical company. Its breakthrough drug, Avonex, slowed the progress of multiple sclerosis. The successful development of Covid-19 vaccines attracted worldwide attention. Moderna and Beth Israel Medical Center (for Johnson & Johnson) developed effective Covid-19 vaccines; Pfizer manufactured its vaccine in suburban Andover. A globally-competitive innovation ecosystem has also developed to spawn myriad breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, 3-D printing, and climate tech.

Forging a Pluralistic Community

Anglo-Protestants dominated Boston’s population well into the nineteenth century, more so than in any other large American city. Yet, the city’s development as a major seaport made it an important immigrant gateway to America. Irish Catholics changed the city’s demographic composition when they migrated by the thousands to Boston during the calamitous Potato Famine of 1845-1850. In 1850, 35,000 Boston residents (25% of the population) were Irish-born. Between 1820 and 1880, 90% of Boston’s immigrants were Irish.[17] The influx of Irish people, who were destitute, sick, and members of a scorned religious denomination, caused deep tensions with the local Anglo-Americans. Protestant workers had long loathed Catholicism, evidenced by the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown in 1834.                                        Irish immigrants ultimately helped make Boston a more pluralistic community. They established their own political organizations, churches, schools, and social welfare institutions. Oscar Handlin explained that the presence of the Irish forced everyone to think about their ethnic identity: “No man now could think of his place in society simply in terms of occupation or income level. It was necessary also to consider ethnic affiliation.”[18] This extended to the American-born, who identified themselves as descendants of Anglo-Saxons (referred to colloquially as “Yankees”). Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. christened the city’s traditional elite as “Brahmins,” after the Hindu priestly caste.                                                                                             The antagonism between the Yankees and the Irish was played out most openly in politics. Some of the fiercest clashes took place in the first half of the twentieth century during the tenures of Mayors John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and James Michael Curley, who rose to power by stoking the fires of Irish resentment. This situation changed after World War II, when economic prosperity vaulted the Irish and other non-Protestant European immigrants into the assimilated middle class. Bostonian John F. Kennedy’s election as the country’s first Roman Catholic President marked this symbolic event.                                                                                                Between the 1880s and 1920, Southern Italians and East European Jews immigrated to Boston by the thousands. By 1920, 38,800 Italians comprised 90% of the North End’s population. They endured discrimination because of their Catholic religion, lack of English mastery, and different cultural practices. The country’s foremost anti-immigration organization, the Immigration Restriction League, was founded by members of the Brahmin elite in Boston in 1894, partly in reaction to the arrival of large numbers of Italians. This organization decried the threat to American society from  poor migrants pouring into the country from Southern and Eastern Europe.                                                                                                                                    During the 1880s, Jews from Russian territories started immigrating in large numbers to Boston, escaping violent pogroms. These Jewish immigrants first settled in the North End and the West End. Jews adjusted to American society by cultivating a strong sense of community rooted in synagogues and starting their own businesses. They experienced religious prejudice, which increased during the 1920s. After World War II, anti-Semitism receded and Jews, like other European ethnic groups, joined the American middle-class mainstream.[19] Other ethnic groups settling in Boston prior to 1920 included immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Greece, French Canada, the Canadian Maritimes, Syria-Lebanon, Armenia, the West Indies, and the Azores.                                                                                                                                      The Chinese suffered the most discrimination of any immigrant group. The Chinese arrived Boston in the 1870s, fleeing the violent racial attacks they suffered in the West.  Immigration by Chinese male laborers was officially prohibited by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). In Boston, they were hemmed in by cultural bias and ended up being limited mostly to operating laundries and eating places. By 1900, there were 1,000 Chinese, almost entirely males, living in a tight little neighborhood south of downtown. This Chinatown became third largest in the United States, after San Francisco and New York.                                                                           Immigration dried up during the 1920s, when the National Origins Act (1924) set quotas for immigration, limiting the annual number of arrivals from a country to no more than 2% of their number entering the United States as of 1890. This was tailored to exclude Italians and Jews in particular. The 1924 Act banned almost all Asians and Africans. The overall percentage of foreign-born people living in Boston declined from a peak of 36% in 1910 to 30% in 1930, to 24% in 1940, to a low point of 13% in 1970.[20]                                                                               Immigration started increasing again after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which was designed to reunite families of U.S. citizens, attract professional and skilled migrants, and admit refugees. As of 2018, the city of Boston was home to 194,000 foreign-born people, or 27.9% of the population. The largest groups in the foreign-born population were, in descending order, Dominican Republic, China, Haiti, Jamaica, Vietnam, and El Salvador. In metropolitan Boston, foreign immigrants, totaling 479,810, were responsible for 90% of net population growth between 1990 and 2017.[21] These newcomers created vibrant, though still economically-disadvantaged, neighborhoods. The 2000 U.S. Census reported that Boston had become a majority-minority city, which has since been reflected in a growing number of Latinos, Asians, and Blacks elected to municipal and state office. Most notable was the election of Chinese-American Michelle Wu as Mayor in 2021.                                                                                   African-Americans have been on a different trajectory, having lived in Boston since some were enslaved there during colonial times. Slavery was legalized in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1641 and, according to Wendy Warren’s New England Bound, flourished to a greater extent than formerly was realized. It has been estimated that, between 1755 and 1764, 2.2% of the colony’s populations was made up of enslaved people (out of a total population of approximately 235,000, as of 1760), who primarily lived and worked in port towns. Inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric of that time, enslaved Blacks sued for their freedom, and, in some cases, obtained it.[22] In 1783, Massachusetts became the first state to prohibit slavery outright. In 1800, there were 1,174 Blacks (4.7% of population) living in Boston, rising to 2,261 (1.3%) in 1860. Blacks during this time were involved in breaking down barriers to their education in Boston and the broader goal of abolishing slavery. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Boston was a hotbed of Black activism. Editor of the Guardian William Monroe Trotter was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin founded the country’s first Black woman’s newspaper, The Women’s Era. Her husband George Lewis Ruffin, the first Black to graduate from Harvard Law School, was the first Black Boston judge. Pauline Hopkins was one of the first published Black novelists and the editor of the Colored American Magazine.

The proportion of Boston Blacks was relatively small until the migration from the South that took place between 1940 and 1970. Such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., as a student at Boston University Theology School, and Malcolm X lived in Boston during this period. The increase of the Black population from 23,679 (3.1%) in 1940 to 104,707 (15.8%) in 1970 created tensions with white residents, which peaked during the busing crisis of the mid-1970s. Whites angrily resisted integrating neighborhood schools when Black students were bused there. The damage to race relations lasted for years, harming Boston’s reputation. In any case, the Black population continued to grow, reaching 148,780 (22.0%) in 2020.[23]

Development of the City and the Metropolitan Area

Because of Boston’s limited land area, the city started creating land along the waterfront with fill around 1800. Further land-filling created the neighborhoods of the South End, Back Bay, South Boston and much of East Boston. Beacon Hill was developed by reducing its height. Architect Charles Bulfinch built a new State House there in 1798 and, adjacent to it, laid out one of the country’s earliest residential subdivisions, which became the home of the city’s social elite. Because of its historical importance, Beacon Hill became Boston’s first historic preservation district (1955).                                                                                                Boston’s most notable land creation project was filling the Back Bay mudflats in the Charles River estuary between 1857 and 1894. The street grid was oriented around the Parisian-style boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue, which became the city’s most prestigious thoroughfare. The area around Copley Square became the city’s cultural center, with construction of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/MIT (1866), Museum of Fine Arts (1876), Boston Public Library (1895), and other educational and religious institutions. Urban critic Lewis Mumford wrote that, with L’Enfant’s Washington, DC, Back Bay was “‘the outstanding achievement in American city planning of the nineteenth century.”[24]                                                 Park space has been an essential feature of Boston. The 50-acre Boston Common (1634), which was used for grazing livestock in the colonial era, is the oldest public park in America. Adjacent to the Boston Common, the city created a formally landscaped Public Garden (1837), considered the country’s first botanical garden. Landscaped open space was influenced by Mount Auburn Cemetery (1831), in Cambridge, which was the country’s first “garden cemetery,” with picturesque grounds replete with artistic monuments to the dead. Boston Common, the Public Garden, and Commonwealth Avenue serve as anchors for a network of green spaces designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Popularly referred to as the Emerald Necklace, the park system, whose construction began in 1878, includes the Back Bay Fens, the Riverway, Olmsted Park, Jamaica Pond, the Arnold Arboretum, and Franklin Park.                                                             Olmsted’s Boston parks were such a success that his protégé Charles Eliot designed, during the 1890s, a metropolitan park system that stretches through the suburbs. It is considered the first example of regional environmental planning in the country. Between 1893 and 1900, the Metropolitan Park Commission acquired 9,177 acres of reservations, 13 miles of oceanfront, and 56 miles of riverbanks and built seven parkways. Perhaps the most consequential project was the Charles River Reservation. The Charles River was an estuary flowing into Boston Harbor. Charles Eliot proposed building a dam to close off the river from the sea, creating a picturesque basin appropriate for recreation and the siting of college campuses. The metropolitan plan also created the country’s first public beaches at Revere and Nantasket.                                                            During the nineteenth century, Bostonians, like residents of other cities, were seeking countrified living when possible. Suburban development got underway in earnest in the 1840s, following the construction of railroad lines radiating out from Boston. Some of the first suburban “garden” subdivisions were laid out around railroad stations in Brookline, Newton, and Winchester. Streetcars were also instrumental in the growth of suburbs and to the overall expansion of Boston’s urban landscape. Horse-drawn streetcar service started in 1856, between Harvard Square in Cambridge and downtown Boston. The electrification of streetcars in 1889 extended suburban development farther from the city center.                                                      Rapid growth made it difficult to keep abreast of infrastructure needs. The towns of Brighton, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxbury, and West Roxbury voted in the years after the Civil War to be annexed by Boston to take advantage of its water, sewer, street, and school systems. In 1874, however, wealthy Brookline voted to remain independent, and no other suburb, except Hyde Park (1912), agreed to annexation by the central city. During the early twentieth century, the parks and parkways of the Metropolitan Park system shaped the character of development in the 39 cities and suburbs comprising the so-called “Metropolitan District.” The green space and recreational amenities provided a leafy appearance to such suburbs as Belmont, Arlington, Medford, Melrose, and Milton.                                                                                                    At the end of World War II, the construction of the first beltway in the United States, Route 128 (which today includes parts of I-95 and I-93), accelerated the out-migration of residents, industries, and retail stores. The commercial real estate firm of Cabot, Cabot & Forbes started building some of the country’s first industrial and office parks. By 1959, 223 industrial companies were located along Route 128, earning it the nickname “America’s Technology Highway.” In 1951, Shopper’s World in Framingham opened as the first suburban shopping center on the East Coast. Metropolitan Boston continued to spread toward the I-495 outer beltway, which opened in the late 1960s approximately 30 miles from downtown Boston. The low-density development pattern has led to one-acre-plus residential lots, big box stores, business parks, and extensive parking lots. Greater Boston forms a metropolitan area with a population of 4,941,632 (2020), making it the tenth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. The combined statistical area is sixth in size, with 8,466,166 people (2020).

Urban Decline and Renewal

As post-World War II suburbia boomed, Boston, like many of the country’s older cities, reached a low ebb. The physical decay, poverty, and crime of the central city drove tens of thousands to the suburbs and frightened off investors. While the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) financed mortgages that made suburban housing highly affordable, these agencies colluded with banks to “redline” urban neighborhoods, thus restricting housing financing in inner cities. Planners designated the West End, North End, South End, Charlestown, and Roxbury as slums. At the same time, the urban landscape was being torn apart to make way for federally-funded highways. The loss of downtown’s prestige, physical decay, racial strife, and increasing crime drove people by the tens of thousands to the suburbs. Having peaked at 801,444 in 1950, Boston’s population dropped to 562,994 in 1980. Under the administration of 1950s Mayor John Hynes, officials determined that the best way to deal with the problems of Boston’s urban decay was to demolish “blighted” structures and neighborhoods and replace them with modern developments. Using federal urban renewal funds, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) cleared the working-class West End by 1960 to build soaring middle-class apartment towers. Herbert J. Gans’s The Urban Villagers (1962), a sociological classic, described the social costs of the neighborhood’s destruction. The planning community and the public grew to consider the West End urban renewal to be colossal mistake.[25]

[Insert Figure 5: Aerial view of demolished West End Urban Renewal area, ca. 1960. City of Boston Archives, Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/West_End_project_area_looking_northeasterly.jpg/732px-West_End_project_area_looking_northeasterly.jpg, no copyright restrictions.]

During the 1960s, Mayor John F. Collins and his BRA Development Administrator Edward J. Logue championed “The New Boston.” They pursued the demolition of tawdry Scollay Square to build Government Center and a new signature City Hall (1968), which became a vivid if controversial symbol of Boston’s rebirth. Other prominent urban renewal projects included the Back Bay Prudential Center (1964) and the harborfront New England Aquarium (1969). Perhaps most impactful redevelopment project was Faneuil Hall Marketplace/Quincy Market (1976), the nineteenth-century wholesale food market that morphed into the nation’s first festival marketplace under the direction of Mayor Kevin White, architect Benjamin Thompson, and developer James Rouse. The success of the marketplace boosted the historic preservation movement and urban revitalization schemes nationally.

During these years, a tide of activism swept Boston’s neighborhoods and remade local politics. Protests prevented the BRA from large-scale urban renewal demolition in Charlestown and the South End. Residents in Boston and Cambridge neighborhoods rose up to block construction of the Inner Belt highway through their communities. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Blacks demanded public school racial integration, rent control, and the creation of community development corporations that would direct neighborhood redevelopment initiatives. In later years, Latino and Asian groups also asserted their claims for community control over local development. By the twenty-first century, these grass roots efforts transformed the city’s Irish- and Italian-dominated old school politics, making it more responsive to the growing Black, Latino, and Asian populations.[26]                                                                                                            As Greater Boston’s economy transitioned into being technology-driven and service-oriented, the urban landscape was being transformed. A blockbuster project at the turn of the millennium was the “Big Dig,” the demolition of the Central Artery, the ugly 1950s elevated highway that separated downtown from the North End and the waterfront. The state replaced it with a higher-capacity underground expressway and created the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway (2007), a 1.25-mile multi-use linear green space in place of the elevated highway. The highway project helped unlock the development potential of the Seaport District, an underutilized warehouse area that has been transformed with new upscale residences and technology and business services offices.

Boston was becoming a global city, a center of finance, life sciences, health care and business management.  Its strength derives from its highly-skilled workforce, much of which has been educated at the region’s universities. Because of its economic attainments, Boston’s population, 617,594 in 2010, grew to 675,647 in 2020. The city’s global status has been recognized by many urban research studies, including a UN Habitat-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences report, which ranked Boston #6 in the world for technological innovation and #14 for overall economic competitiveness.[27] Urban historian Stephen V. Ward summed up Boston’s achievement: “If it is valid to speak of a formula for the post-industrial city, Boston stumbled across it first.”[28]  Yet, the city has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any in America, ranked #7 in one study. While it is home to a large number of well-compensated professionals and technologists, it has a larger number of lower-income service workers and a shrinking middle class.[29]

Boston in Popular Culture

Boston has long played a notable role in American popular culture. In sports-crazed America, Boston has been a rabid sports town since the 1870s and the founding of the city’s first professional baseball team, the Red Stockings. Since 2002, the New England Patriots have won six Super Bowls, the Boston Red Sox have won four World Series, and the Boston Celtics and the Boston Bruins each won one championship. The Red Sox-New York Yankees rivalry is considered the most intense in pro sports. The Red Sox’s Fenway Park is a bona fide tourist attraction. Boston also hosts the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual marathon and a truly global event, and the Head of the Charles Regatta, the world’s largest rowing event.              In recent decades, Boston has been depicted in popular culture as a troublesome place, plagued with conflict and crime. Films such as Mystic River, The Town, Gone, Baby, Gone, Good Will Hunting, and Manchester-by-the-Sea served up working-class tragedy. The violent career of South Boston mobster Whitey Bulger provided fodder for books and movies, including Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The Boston Strangler told the story of the 1960s serial-killer of young women. In The Verdict, Paul Newman portrayed a down-and-out alcoholic attorney operating on the legal margins. The film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, about the travails of a small-time hoodlum, was based upon a novel by George V. Higgins, whose entire oeuvre limned the seamy side of the city. Academy Award-winning Spotlight told the story of the Boston Globe’s efforts to reveal the pedophile crimes perpetrated by Roman Catholic priests and covered up by the Boston Archdiocese. The city is remembered for the busing crisis of the 1970s, when whites opposed to court-ordered school desegregation slung rocks and racial slurs at Black students being bussed under federal court order into South Boston and Charlestown. This story has been best told in J. Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1986). A comic, companionable side of Boston was portrayed in the television show Cheers, about the neighborhood bar “where everybody knows your name.”

[Insert Figure 6 link to photo: Demonstration in support of racial desegregation and court-ordered busing, ca. 1974. James Fraser photograph collection, Northeastern University, Boston Research Center, Encyclopedia of Boston, https://bostonresearchcenter.org/projects_files/eob/single-entry-busing.html]

Discussion of the Literature

With a 400-year history and a community prone to self-examination, much has been written about Boston history and its place within the broader scope of American history. The extent of historical analysis related to Boston often extends to the entirety of Massachusetts and New England because Boston has played such a central economic, cultural, and political role in broader regional development. For a general account of Boston history, see Thomas H. O’Connor’s The Hub: Boston Past and Present and Robert Allison’s A Short History of Boston. For a graphic interpretation of Boston’s evolution, see the handsome cartography of The Atlas of Boston History.[30]

Many historians, including Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan, have written about the Puritans. Jill Lepore and Lisa Brooks are among those who have explained the hostile encounters with Indian tribes, particularly during King Philip’s War. E. Digby Baltzell’s Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia analyzes how Puritan values continued to influence New England culture into the twentieth century. Wendy Warren’s New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America provides an eye-opening picture of New England’s, and particularly Boston’s, involvement in trading and owning African slaves. Mark Peterson’s The City-State of Boston argues provocatively that Boston operated like a city-state until the Civil War.[31] Among the many authors writing about Boston’s role in igniting the Revolution are David Hackett Fischer and Robert Gross.[32] There has been a plethora of books written about Transcendentalism and the cultural life of the antebellum Boston area, including books by and about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and others in their circle. A valuable introduction to Transcendentalism is available from Philip F. Gura. Shaun O’Connell has written a comprehensive overview of Greater Boston literature.[33]                                                      Overviews of planning initiatives and architectural history include books by Walter Muir Whitehill, Lawrence W. Kennedy, Douglass Shand-Tucci, Alex Krieger and David Cobb, Nancy S. Seasholes, Michael Rawson, and Karl Haglund. Sam Bass Warner, Jr.’s Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 is a pioneering treatment in urban history. Warner and James C. O’Connell have written books explaining Boston’s metropolitan development.[34]                  One of the most discussed chapters in Boston history is its late-twentieth-century revitalization. Good overviews are provided by Thomas H. O’Connor and Lizabeth Cohen. Jim Vrabel and Karilyn Crockett describe grass roots efforts resisting destructive urban renewal and highway projects and redeveloping the city’s neighborhoods. Lawrence J. Vale tells the story of public housing in Boston.[35] Works by Peter Temin and Edward Glaeser have surveyed Boston’s economic evolution.[36] The field of environmental history has been receiving increased interest. A diverse collection of essays is provided in Remaking Boston. William Cronon and John Hanson Mitchell have written instructive environmental studies.[37]                                                                                 There is a great deal of material on social history, especially on ethnic groups and their impact on the Boston community. A classic work is Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880.  Marilynn S. Johnson, The New Bostonians provides an account of immigration following the Immigration Act of 1965. Thomas H. O’Connor, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Jack Beatty have written about the Irish involvement in politics. Stephen Puleo has written about the Boston Italians. Gerald Gamm has written about Jewish history. Treatment of the Black experience in Boston includes works by Lois E. and James O. Horton, Adelaide Cromwell, and Kerri Greenidge. Sarah Deutsch has written about women’s evolving social role in Boston. Authors writing on LGBTQ history include Douglass Shand-Tucci and Russ Lopez.[38]

 

Keywords

Boston, American Revolution, technological innovation, urban redevelopment, immigration, social reform, maritime economy, American culture

Primary Sources

With Boston’s long history and the region maintaining a deep attachment to its heritage, many rich research sources exist. The leading archive for Massachusetts history is the Massachusetts Historical Society, the oldest historical society in the country (1791). Its archives include over 3,700 collections of personal, institutional, and business papers as well as extensive collections of books, pamphlets, maps, newspapers, photographs, works of art, and historical artifacts. The Massachusetts State Archives is a source for materials related to state and, to a lesser degree, local government going back to the original Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter. The Archives also has materials related to vital records and family history. The New England Genealogical Society (website American Ancestors: A National Center for Family History, Heritage, & Culture) was founded in 1845 as the first U.S. genealogical society. It provides a searchable online database of more than 1.4 billion names spanning the U.S., British isles, continental Europe and beyond, with a voluminous collection of New England-related genealogical records. The Boston Public Library has a large collection of nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers as well as a collection of records and materials related to Boston history. The Boston Athenaeum has extensive special collections that include papers of prominent local figures, photographs, maps, and rare books related to Boston. The American Antiquarian Society, located in Worcester MA, is a research library of American history and culture through 1876. The library includes manuscripts, books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and graphic arts related to Greater Boston. Boston academic libraries are also repositories of materials related to local history. For example, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library has collections relating to the history of women and gender, both for Boston and nationally. The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School maintains archives related to the history of local business, while the library of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) includes materials related to architecture and urban planning in the Boston area.

Links to Digital Materials

Digital Commonwealth – Massachusetts Collections Online – This website makes available historic printed materials, photographs, ephemera, and other materials from over 200 Massachusetts libraries, museums, and historical societies.

Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library – Collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases, including 10,000 digitized maps, with a particular strength in the New England region.

Further Readings

Beatty, Jack. The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1992.

Cohen, Lizabeth. Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Haglund, Karl. Inventing the Charles River. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation. Cambridge:        Harvard University Press, 1991.

Kennedy, Lawrence W. Kennedy. Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630. Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Lukas, J. Anthony. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.                                                                               O’Connell, James C. The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.

O’Connell, Shaun.  Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape. Boston:  Beacon Press, 1990.

Peterson, Mark. The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Seasholes, Nancy S. The Atlas of Boston History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Shand-Tucci, Douglass. Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Vrabel, Jim. A People’s History of the New Boston. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

Warner, Jr., Sam Bass, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900.   Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

[1] Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), pp. 25-26.

[2] The 21,000 migrants became the breeding stock for New England, which doubled in population every generation for two centuries. The number of descendants reached 100,000 by 1700 and more than one million by 1800. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 16-17.

[3] Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, 1965), pp. 66, 278; Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 199-205.

[4] Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston: A to Z (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 190-191.

[5] Tristram Hunt, Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), pp. 39-40.

[6] Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 22.

[7] Edward L. Glaeser, “Reinventing Boston, 1640-2003,” NBER Working Paper 10166, December, 2003, p. 16, http://www.nber.org/papers/w10166.

[8] Ibid., p. 389.

[9] Thomas H. O’Connor, The Athens of America: Boston, 1825-1845 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. xii-xiii, 115.

[10]  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive, August 31, 1837, http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar.

[11] Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1940), pp. 330, 409; Martin Green, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Culture History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), p. 24; Robert N. Linscott, ed., State of Mind: A Boston Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1948), p. xi.

[12] Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

[13] Peter Hall and Paschal Preston, The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology and the Geography of Innovation, 1846–2003 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 137.

[14] Robert M. Krim with Alan R. Earls, Boston Made: From Revolution to Robotics, Innovations That Changed the World (Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge, 2021), p. 100.

[15] Glaeser, “Reinventing Boston, 1640-2003,” p. 21.

[16] Ibid., p. 116.

[17] Marilynn S. Johnson, The New Bostonians: How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Region Since the 1980s (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), pp. 14-15.

[18] Oscar Handlin. Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation (Boston: Atheneum, 1974), p.219. Handlin wrote that “the old society felt a sense of malaise because newcomers did not fit into its categories, and resentment, because they threatened its stability. Uneasy, it attempted to avoid contact by withdrawing ever farther into a solid, coherent, and circumscribed group of its own, until in the fifties it evolved the true Brahmin who believed, with Holmes, that a man of family required ‘four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen’ behind him.” Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, p. 177.

[19] Jonathan D. Sarna, Ellen Smith, and Scott Martin Kosofsky, eds., The Jews of Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 56.

[20] Johnson, The New Bostonians, p. 33; Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1924, 47^th ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, July, 1925), p. 83, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1925/compendia/statab/47ed.html,

(accessed January 10, 2022).

[21] Boston Planning & Development Agency, Research Division, Boston by the Numbers 2020, pp. 37-38, http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/51f1c894-4e5f-45e4-aca2-0ec3d0be80d6, (accessed January 12, 2022); U.S. Census Bureau, “Boston, Massachusetts, Quick Facts,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/bostoncitymassachusetts,US/PST045219, (accessed January 12, 2022). Peter Ciurczak, Sandy Kendall, and Elena Stone, eds., Changing Faces of Greater Boston, (Boston: Boston Foundation Indicators Project, 2019), p. 10.

[22] Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016); Massachusetts Court System, “Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery,” Commonwealth of Massachusetts, https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-constitution-and-the-abolition-of-slavery, (accessed January 12, 2023); “Population in the Colonial and Continental Periods,” U.S. Census Bureau, p. 9, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/00165897ch01.pdf.

[23] Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Total by Race, 1790-1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970-1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, Population Division, Working Paper No. 76 (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, February, 2005),

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2005/demo/POP-twps0076.pdf; Boston Indicators, Changing Faces of Greater Boston, p. 31; Boston Planning & Development Agency Research Division, “Further Insights from 2020 Census Redistricting Data,” August 20, 2021, https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/8818db70-f9ca-4f48-944a-83f8a32c2cd1.

[24] Quoted in Douglass Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 38.

[25] Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: The Free Press, 1962).

[26] Jim Vrabel, A People’s History of the New Boston (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014); Karilyn Crockett, People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

[27] Ni Pengfei, Marco Kamiya, Guo Jing, Zhang Yi, et al, Global Urban Competitiveness Report: Global Urban Value Chain: Insight into Human Civilization over Time and Space (2020-2021), UN Habitat and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, National Academy of Economic Strategy, 2021,  https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2021/11/1_report_on_competitiveness_of_cities_worldwide2020-2021.pdf.

[28] Ni Pengfei, Marco Kamiya, Guo Jing, Zhang Yi, et al, Global Urban Competitiveness Report: Global Urban Value Chain: Insight into Human Civilization over Time and Space (2020-2021), UN Habitat and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, National Academy of Economic Strategy, 2021,  https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2021/11/1_report_on_competitiveness_of_cities_worldwide2020-2021.pdf; Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850-2000 (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 191.

[29] Luc Shuster and Peter Ciurczak, Boston’s Booming… But for Whom?: Building Shared Prosperity in a Time of Growth (Boston, Boston Indicators, 2018), pp. 17, 18, 20, https://www.bostonindicators.org/reports/report-website-pages/shared-prosperity.

[30] Thomas H. O’Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001); Robert Allison, A Short History of Boston (Carlisle, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2004); Nancy S. Seasholes, The Atlas of Boston History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

[31] Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939); Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999); Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: The Free Press, 1979); Peterson, The City-State of Boston.

[32] Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 

[33] Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2014); Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940); Martin Green, The Problem of Boston (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); Shaun O’Connell, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

[34] Walter Muir Whitehill and Lawrence W. Kennedy, Boston: A Topographical History, 3^rd ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000); Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Douglass Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Alex Krieger and David Cobb, Mapping Boston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Karl Haglund, Inventing the Charles River (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Greater Boston: Adapting Regional Traditions to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); James C. O’Connell, The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).

[35] Thomas H. O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993); Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019); Vrabel, A People’s History of the New Boston; Crockett, People before Highways; Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

[36] Peter Temin, ed. Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Glaeser, “Reinventing Boston, 1640-2003.”

[37] Anthony N. Penna and Conrad Edick Wright, eds, Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); John Hanson Mitchell, The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).

[38]  Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants; Johnson, The New Bostonians; Thomas H. O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995); Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1992); Stephen Puleo, The Boston Italians (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007); Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Lois E. and James O. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979); Adelaide Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750-1950. University of Arkansas Press, 1994); Kerri Greenidge, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (New York: Liveright, 2019); Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Russ Lopez, The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond (Boston: Shawmut Peninsula Press, 2019).