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Since many North American indigenous societies also built and inhabited towns, America was not an entirely rural continent before the arrival of Europeans. Nevertheless, when Europeans set out to colonize their “wilderness,” they arrived with a practical and ideological commitment to recreating cities of the sort with which they were familiar on their home continent. The result of their ambitions was the rapid founding and development of European-style cities, the vast majority of which clustered on large bodies of water, either directly on the Atlantic Ocean or on the seas and river estuaries adjacent to it. The pace of city expansion was closely linked to the levels of support for cities among colonists and an economic environment that stimulated urban growth. Some cities grew faster than others, but by the middle of the 18th century even Virginia and Maryland, the most rural colonies, had towns that played a critical cultural, political, and economic role in society. By the revolutionary era, the centrality of North America’s seaports was cemented by their status as crucibles of the conflict. The issue of which seaport was the new United States’ premier city was contested, but the importance of cities to North American society was no longer debated.

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.