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Welcome to Boston! Massachusetts
The town was named Boston
around 1630 after the town of the same name in England, which had been
named after St. Botolph, the patron saint of fishing. From the beginning,
the growing town used the Atlantic Ocean as its lifeline, and over the
next 40 years, Bostonians built more than 730 ships. As Boston became a
center for publishing, education and trade, the strict moral teachings of
the Puritans clashed with the zeal of emerging merchant class.
By 1680, the once independent colony was firmly under British control. As
Paul Revere's famous engraving of 1768 shows, British warships conveyed
troops to the city in response to protests over the Stamp Act of 1765,
which required tax stamps to be placed on any published materials. The act
was later rescinded after protests by the "Sons of Liberty," who
included Samuel Adams, John Hancock and John Adams.
But the British Crown issued mandates that imposed additional taxes on the
colony. By 1770, there was one British soldier in town for every four
colonists. The powder keg exploded on March 5, 1770, with the Boston
Massacre. The site where British troops fired into a crowd of colonists,
killing five people, is marked today by a ring of cobblestones at Congress
and State Streets.
The tide turned for the Bostonians with George Washington's first major
victory on March 16, 1776. Using the cover of night, the rebel army moved
much of their artillery to the top of Dorchester Heights. British troops
awoke to find enough cannon staring down at them to destroy their fleet
anchored in Boston Harbor. On March 17th, Evacuation Day, they fled the
city, and the date has been a city holiday ever since.
The end of the Civil War signaled an end to Boston's booming economy.
Newly constructed rail lines eliminated trade from Boston's waterfront.
Factories around the country produced goods more cheaply than in Boston,
and the shoe and textile industries vanished by the 1920s.
With the arrival of the Great
Depression of the 1930s, Boston's economy seemed doomed. Renovation of
Boston's economy finally came at the hands of Mayor John Collins, who
undertook a massive restructuring of the city in the 1950s. Many old
landmarks were destroyed, but he also created many jobs and helped pump
dollars into the slowly reawakening economy.
Boston, now one of the country's major centers of high-tech development
and a popular tourist destination, has entered the new millennium with the
energy, perseverance and heady spirit that have always been the city's
trademarks.
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