🇺🇸 United States · East Coast
Boston is probably the most European and the most history-laden city in the whole of the United States. Here, in streets that keep an old layout and an air of Old England, a good part of the nation was born: it was the setting for the Tea Party, for the first clashes of the American Revolution and for the seed of independence. Walking its Freedom Trail —a red line painted on the ground linking the historic sites— is to walk through the birth of the United States, among colonial burying grounds, churches and 18th-century houses.
But Boston does not live on its past alone. It is one of the great capitals of knowledge in the world: across the Charles River, in Cambridge, are Harvard University and MIT, two of the most prestigious institutions on the planet, which fill the city with students, bookstores, cafés and intellectual energy. It is also a city of neighborhoods with enormous character —aristocratic Beacon Hill with its cobbled streets and gas lamps, the very Italian North End, elegant Back Bay— and of huge sporting passion, with baseball's Red Sox at legendary Fenway Park.
This guide covers the essentials of Boston with a practical, warm eye: how to follow the Freedom Trail, which neighborhoods to walk, how to cross to Cambridge to see Harvard, which museums to choose, where to eat the best lobster or clam chowder and how to make the most of a city that is walkable, historic and young all at once. Boston combines like few others the weight of history, university life and the charm of New England.
Before the Europeans, the area was inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples such as the Massachusett, who gave the state its name. In 1630, a group of English Puritan settlers led by John Winthrop founded Boston on a peninsula beside Massachusetts Bay, seeking to build a model religious society (the famous 'city upon a hill'). The name came from Boston, in England. The city grew as a prosperous commercial port and a center of Puritanism, and was the cradle of early institutions: the Boston Latin School and Harvard University, both founded in the 1630s. In the 18th century, Boston became the epicenter of resistance to British taxes: the Boston Massacre (1770) and the celebrated Tea Party (Boston Tea Party, 1773), when colonists in disguise threw the Crown's tea into the sea, both happened here. In 1775, the clashes at Lexington and Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill, near the city, ignited the War of Independence. For all this it is called the 'cradle of liberty'. In the 19th century, Boston was an intellectual and abolitionist center, and received great waves of immigrants, above all Irish (hence its strong Irish-Catholic identity, embodied in families such as the Kennedys). In the 20th and 21st centuries it established itself as a world capital of education, medicine and technology. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of the nation: Wampanoag land where the Mayflower pilgrims landed, stage of the Revolution in Boston, home of Harvard and of the summer season on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.
Read the history of Massachusetts →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the Europeans arrived, the Massachusetts Bay region was inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples, among them the Massachusett, who gave the future state its name (the place name is usually associated with the idea of 'by the great hill'). They lived from fishing, hunting and farming, in villages scattered along the coast. The epidemics brought by the first European contacts, in the early 17th century, tragically decimated this population even before mass colonization.
The founding of Boston is bound up with the Puritan movement. The Puritans were English Protestants who sought to 'purify' the Anglican Church and who, persecuted in England, decided to emigrate to America to build a society according to their religious ideals. In 1630, a large expedition led by John Winthrop, at the head of the Massachusetts Bay Company, reached the region. After a first settlement, the group moved to a peninsula the natives called Shawmut, drawn by its good water sources, and founded the city there, naming it Boston in memory of the English town of the same name, where several of the settlers came from.
Winthrop expressed the spiritual ambition of that project in a celebrated image: the new community was to be 'a city upon a hill', a moral example watched by the whole world. Boston thus became the center of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony, a deeply religious, austere and theocratic society that nevertheless laid down foundations of great consequence early on, such as the value placed on education.
Over the course of the 17th century, Boston grew rapidly into the main port and commercial center of the English colonies of New England. Its excellent natural harbor connected it to an active Atlantic trade —including, as in so many economies of the period, the slave trade and the trade in rum, sugar and molasses— and the city filled with merchants, artisans and sailors. The sea defined its character for centuries.
But the most singular feature of Puritan Boston was its early and profound valuing of education and the written word, tied to the importance Protestantism placed on reading the Bible. In 1635 the Boston Latin School was founded, the oldest public school in the United States, and in 1636 Harvard College was created in neighboring Cambridge, the first institution of higher education in the country, intended in principle to train ministers of religion. A few years later, in 1638, the first printing press in the English colonies of North America arrived in the area.
This founding commitment to education would mark the identity of Boston and its region forever, sowing the seed of what over the centuries would become one of the greatest concentrations of universities and research centers on the planet. The city was also the scene of the tensions and rigidities of Puritan society, such as religious conflicts and, by the end of the century, the hysteria that led to the celebrated witch trials in nearby Salem (1692).
In the second half of the 18th century, Boston became the epicenter of the growing tension between the Thirteen Colonies and the British metropolis. After the costly imperial wars, the British Parliament began imposing a series of taxes on the colonies (on stamped paper, tea, sugar and other goods) without the colonists having any representation in London. From this came the celebrated cry of protest: 'No taxation without representation'. Boston, a merchant and combative city, led the resistance.
The tension erupted into violence on 5 March 1770, in what became known as the Boston Massacre: a crowd harassing a group of British soldiers was fired upon, leaving five dead. The episode, skillfully publicized by patriots such as Paul Revere through a famous engraving, became a powerful propaganda symbol against British oppression. But the most celebrated act came on 16 December 1773: in protest against the tea tax and the East India Company's monopoly, a group of colonists —some disguised as Mohawk Indians— boarded three ships in the harbor and threw their entire cargo of tea into the sea. That audacious defiance went down in history as the Boston Tea Party.
The British response was harsh: a series of punitive laws (the 'Intolerable Acts') that closed the port of Boston and cut back Massachusetts self-government. Far from quelling the rebellion, these measures united the colonies in support of Boston and hastened the march to war. The city had earned forever its place as the American 'cradle of liberty'.
The spark that lit the American War of Independence flew in the surroundings of Boston, in the spring of 1775. The British troops occupying the city planned an expedition to seize the weapons the colonial militias (the 'minutemen', ready to fight in a minute) had stored in the town of Concord. The patriots, forewarned, organized a warning system to give timely notice of any movement by the 'redcoats'.
On the night of 18 to 19 April 1775, once it was confirmed that the British were leaving by sea, the famous signal was made from the steeple of Boston's Old North Church: two lit lanterns ('one if by land, two if by sea'). Paul Revere and other riders then set off at a gallop to alert the country militias. At dawn on 19 April, at Lexington, the first clash took place; hours later, at Concord, the militias pushed the British back at the bridge known as the North Bridge. Those first shots were baptized by the poet Emerson as 'the shot heard round the world'.
The war had begun. In June 1775, on the outskirts of Boston, the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill was fought, in which the militias, though finally driven from their positions, inflicted heavy casualties on the British and showed they were prepared to stand up to them. After a long siege, the patriot forces under George Washington's command succeeded in March 1776 in getting the British to evacuate the city. Boston was free and enshrined as the place where the fight for independence had been born.
The 19th century transformed Boston profoundly. The city grew physically in remarkable ways: large landfill works reclaimed ground from the sea, creating whole neighborhoods such as Back Bay and the South End on former marshes and bays. Boston went from being a peninsula to a far more extensive city, and gradually acquired the parks, libraries and cultural institutions that still characterize it today.
By mid-century, Boston received mass immigration, above all of Irish fleeing the Great Potato Famine (1840s). That wave, along with later ones (Italians in the North End, Jews, and later other communities), changed the composition of the city forever, giving it its strong Catholic and Irish identity. Although they suffered discrimination at first, Irish Bostonians eventually attained enormous political and social weight, embodied later in families such as the Kennedys.
Boston was also an intellectual and moral beacon for the country. It was one of the great centers of the abolitionist movement against slavery, with influential figures and publications, and a stop on the 'Underground Railroad' that helped enslaved people reach freedom. A notable cultural movement also flourished —transcendentalism, with authors such as Emerson and Thoreau— and the city earned the nickname, half in earnest and half in jest, of 'the Hub' or even 'the Athens of America', for its literary, educational and reformist ferment.
After a period of relative industrial decline in the early 20th century, Boston managed to reinvent itself by leaning on precisely that founding seed: education and knowledge. The extraordinary concentration of universities and research centers in the area —with Harvard and MIT at the head, but also dozens of other institutions— turned Boston and its metropolitan region into one of the world capitals of higher education, science, medicine and technology.
That academic base drove the development of high-tech, biotechnology and financial services industries. The Route 128 corridor around the city was one of the country's first technology hubs, and today Cambridge and the Boston area host some of the largest biomedical research centers and most innovative companies on the planet. Boston's teaching hospitals are among the most prestigious in the world. The city thus moved from its port and manufacturing past to a knowledge-based economy.
At the same time, Boston retains a proud attachment to its history and its traditions. It looks after and celebrates its revolutionary heritage through the Freedom Trail and the historic parks; it keeps its neighborhood identities alive (the Irish, the Italian, aristocratic Beacon Hill); and it lives its sport with passion, embodied in legendary teams such as baseball's Red Sox or basketball's Celtics. In recent decades, major urban projects —such as burying the central artery, the 'Big Dig'— have renewed its face. Today Boston combines, like few cities, the weight of the country's oldest history with the energy of one of the most innovative and university-driven metropolises in the world.