Boston
Boston
- James C. O'ConnellJames C. O'ConnellCity Planning-Urban Affairs, Boston University
Summary
Boston has been an influential city in the development of the United States for more than four hundred years. Located on the Shawmut Peninsula and originally inhabited by Indigenous Massachusett people, Boston became 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 19th century, the port of Boston was second in dollar value 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. Boston’s 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 nonunion states, Boston lost population and economic advantage to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. By the 1950s, Boston suffered from demographic and industrial decline, but the city embarked upon a decades-long effort to reinvent itself. Its economy gradually shifted to the advanced technology and the defense industries. Prominent urban revitalization projects started in the 1960s and 1970s with Government Center and the redevelopment of the 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 21st century, Boston, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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.
Keywords
Subjects
- Urban History