Boston History

The short version, with dates you can trust

• 1630: Puritan colonists led by John Winthrop found Boston on the Shawmut Peninsula, a place already long inhabited by the Massachusett people.
• 1634: Boston Common is set aside. It is the oldest public park in the United States, and it started as a place to graze cows and hang criminals.
• 1635: Boston Latin School is founded. It is the oldest public school in America and it is still open, still free, and you can test into it.
• 1742: Faneuil Hall opens. It becomes the room where colonists argue themselves into a revolution, which is why they call it the Cradle of Liberty.
• March 5, 1770: British soldiers fire into a crowd on King Street, killing five. It becomes known as the Boston Massacre.
• December 16, 1773: colonists throw 342 chests of tea into the harbor rather than pay a tax they had no vote on. No taxation without representation was not a slogan. It was a grievance about who gets a say.
• 1822: Boston stops being a town and is incorporated as a city, with a mayor and a council.
• Late 1800s: Frederick Law Olmsted designs the Emerald Necklace, a roughly 1,100-acre chain of connected parks, on the theory that working people deserve beauty too.

Notice what the Tea Party was actually about

Every American schoolchild learns that colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor. Far fewer are told what they were angry about, and the answer is worth more to you than the anecdote.

The tax burden itself was not unusually harsh. What enraged them was who imposed it: a Parliament in which they had no representative, could elect no representative, and could vote out no member at all. Their objection was structural. Somebody else was making the decisions, and the governed had no mechanism to reach them.

Hold that next to the home rule page, where you will read that Boston has voted three separate times to let sixteen year olds vote in its own municipal elections, and each time the final decision sat with a legislature Boston does not control. History rhymes rather than repeats, and the comparison is inexact. The shape of the complaint, though, is very old in this city, and you will recognize it now whenever you see it.

The neighborhood the city erased

In the 1950s Boston decided the West End was a slum. It was a dense, poor, largely Italian and Jewish neighborhood of about 7,000 people, and the city demolished nearly all of it, evicting the residents and levelling their streets in the name of urban renewal. What went up in its place was expensive housing that almost none of them could afford. The neighborhood was never rebuilt.

People who grew up there still describe it as a place that was taken, and the crucial detail is that every step of it was legal. There was a plan, a process, hearings, and a vote. The machinery of government worked exactly as designed and destroyed a community anyway, because the people who lived there had almost no power inside that machinery.

That is the strongest argument this entire website can make for showing up. Government is a machine rather than a villain, and it grinds in the direction of whoever is standing at the controls. Your move is to go and stand there.

The history that needs a page of its own

One part of Boston’s past is far too large to sit in a bullet point on this page, so it has a page to itself.

In 1974 a federal judge found that the Boston School Committee had deliberately and knowingly segregated the city’s public schools, and ordered them desegregated by busing. What followed was years of violence, resistance, police at school doors, and an exodus that the school system has never recovered from. It is the most consequential thing that has happened to Boston’s schools in living memory, and if you are a BPS student, you are sitting inside its consequences right now.

That story is told in full, and without flinching, right here.

Busing and the Long Reckoning →

Go stand in it

Boston’s history lives in buildings you can walk into rather than in a museum case, and most of them are free and open today.

• Faneuil Hall. The Great Hall upstairs is still a public meeting room. Free, open, and the National Park Service gives talks in it.
• Boston Common. Nearly four hundred years old and still the place Bostonians go to argue in public. Protests have started here for centuries.
• The Freedom Trail. A red line in the pavement connecting sixteen sites. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and you have probably walked over it without following it.
• The Boston Public Library, Copley Square. The first large free municipal library in America. Walk into Bates Hall and look up. Then get a card, because it costs nothing.
• The State House, 24 Beacon Street. Free tours, and a public gallery above both chambers. Your government is in session up there.