Who ruled Boston?

Boston sits on a sheltered harbour where the Charles and Mystic rivers reach Massachusetts Bay. The original town occupied the Shawmut Peninsula, a small knot of hills tied to the mainland by a thin neck of land, and English Puritans settled there in 1630 for its springs and safe anchorage. Two threads run through its story: the part it played in starting the American Revolution, and the way it kept enlarging itself, cutting down hills and filling tidal flats until the modern city covered many times the ground of the first settlement.

The coast was home to the Massachusett people, who moved between seasonal camps along the rivers and islands. Epidemics carried by European fishermen and traders in 1616 to 1619 killed much of the coastal population only a few years before English colonists came. A lone Anglican clergyman, William Blaxton, was living on the peninsula by about 1625. In 1630 settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Company under John Winthrop crossed from Charlestown at his invitation and named their town after Boston in Lincolnshire, where several of their leaders had lived.

Early Boston was a godly commonwealth in which church membership and political rights went together. Boston Latin School opened in 1635 and Harvard College followed across the river in 1636. Merchants sent fish, timber and ships to the Caribbean and Europe, and Boston became the largest town in English North America. The colony's charter was cancelled in 1684, and in 1686 Massachusetts was folded into the Dominion of New England under Governor Edmund Andros, whom Bostonians overthrew in April 1689. A new charter of 1691 made Massachusetts a royal province of the Kingdom of England. Benjamin Franklin was born in the town in 1706.

After the Seven Years' War, Parliament's efforts to tax the colonies met fierce resistance here. British troops arrived in 1768, soldiers shot five townspeople in the Boston Massacre of March 1770, and in December 1773 protesters dumped a cargo of East India Company tea into the harbour. London responded by closing the port in 1774. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, militia besieged the British garrison in the town. After the costly Battle of Bunker Hill that June, George Washington placed cannon on Dorchester Heights, and the British sailed away on 17 March 1776, an early success of the American Revolution.

Boston became a city in 1822. Its merchant families invested profits from the China trade in New England textile mills, tying the port to the Industrial Revolution, and it was a centre of the abolitionist movement: William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator there in 1831. From the late 1840s tens of thousands of Irish refugees from famine arrived, changing the city's politics for a century. Engineers filled the Back Bay from 1857 onward, and the city absorbed Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown and other neighbours between 1868 and 1874. A great fire in November 1872 burned about 65 acres of downtown, and in 1897 the Tremont Street line opened as the first subway in North America.

Industry declined in the mid twentieth century, and urban renewal levelled whole districts such as the old West End. From the 1980s universities, hospitals, finance and technology firms drove a revival, and a long highway project known as the Big Dig buried the elevated road that had cut off the waterfront. Today Boston has about two-thirds of a million residents at the centre of a metropolitan area of nearly five million in the United States.