Boston

Remains of a Native fish weir found under Boylston Street date back thousands of years. The first European to live on the Shawmut Peninsula was the Anglican cleric William Blaxton, who invited the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to join him; they founded Boston in 1630 and named it after the market town in Lincolnshire.

Boston led the resistance to British rule: the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Tea Party of 1773, when chests of East India Company tea were thrown into the harbour, and, after fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, a siege that ended when cannon placed on Dorchester Heights forced the British to leave in March 1776. In the 19th century the old merchant families, later called the Boston Brahmins, made the city a centre of learning and of the abolitionist movement, while Irish immigrants arrived from the 1820s and Italians and Russian Jews later filled the North End and the West End. Hills were levelled to fill the tidal flats of the Back Bay, and neighbouring towns were annexed.

The 20th century brought decline as factories closed, a deadly molasses flood in the North End in 1919 and conflict over school desegregation busing from 1974. Universities, hospitals and finance led a recovery. The Big Dig buried the elevated highway through downtown between 1991 and 2007, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway opened on the land in 2008. The bombing at the marathon finish line in 2013 was met with the slogan Boston Strong. Michelle Wu became mayor in 2021.

Boston has long been called the Athens of America for its literary and academic life, and its density of universities — Harvard and MIT across the river in Cambridge, Boston University, Northeastern, Berklee College of Music and many more — shapes the city, which draws more than 350,000 college students. Symphony Hall is home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops, and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum anchor a strong museum culture.

Irish Catholic heritage runs deep in politics and in neighbourhoods such as South Boston and Charlestown, and Catholics are the largest religious community; the Italian North End keeps its summer feasts for patron saints. Boston also has large Black, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Cape Verdean and Chinese communities, and East Boston has a mixed Latin American population. The Pride parade and festival are held in June.

Sport is close to a civic religion. The Red Sox have played at Fenway Park since 1912, the Celtics and the Bruins share TD Garden, and the Patriots play in Foxborough; between 2001 and 2024 the city's teams won thirteen championships. The marathon on Patriots' Day and the Head of the Charles regatta in October are the year's great participation events.

Boston had about 676,000 residents at the 2020 census, and Greater Boston about 5 million people in 2025, the largest metropolitan area in New England. The city covers only 48 square miles, so it feels dense by American standards, and a large part of the population is young: students, medical residents and early-career researchers.

The economy is led by finance, professional services, information technology and government, and by medicine and research. Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women's and Beth Israel Deaconess are among the country's leading hospitals — the last two clustered with medical schools in the Longwood area — and Boston and Cambridge together form one of the largest biotechnology hubs in the world. Housing is the pressing issue: prices have risen sharply since rent control was ended by a statewide vote in the 1990s, and high rents push many workers to the suburbs.

Daily routines follow the T and the commuter trains, and Boston, nicknamed 'the Walking City', has more pedestrian commuters than comparable cities. The outer neighbourhoods — Dorchester, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Charlestown, South Boston, East Boston — are home to most Bostonians. Life moves outdoors in summer, onto the Esplanade, the harbour islands and the ballpark, and back indoors through long winters of snow.

The city's cooking grew from the sea and from New England farms, with an emphasis on seafood, salt and dairy. Clam chowder, a creamy soup of clams and potatoes, is sold everywhere from market stalls to old oyster bars, and the lobster roll — lobster meat in a toasted bun, usually served cold — is the summer treat. Boston baked beans, sweetened with molasses, were a product of the city's place on the Caribbean trade route, and Boston cream pie, a custard-filled cake, carries the city's name.

The Union Oyster House near Faneuil Hall has served diners since 1826, and the neighbouring Quincy Market is a long food hall in a granite market building of the same year. Next door, the Haymarket pushcart vendors sell fruit, vegetables and fish on Fridays and Saturdays, as they have in one form or another for two centuries.

Immigrant neighbourhoods supply the rest. The North End's Italian restaurants and pastry shops line Hanover Street; Chinatown is the place for Chinese and Vietnamese food, and the city's Dominican, Salvadoran, Haitian and Cape Verdean communities bring their own cooking. Dunkin', founded in nearby Quincy, is part of the daily routine for many Bostonians.