Explore Boston · Part One
Revolutionary Boston & Beyond
Four centuries of the American story, most of it a walk from Boston Common.
Puritans settled the Shawmut peninsula in 1630 and named their town Boston. Since then it has started a revolution, led the fight against slavery, taken in wave after wave of newcomers, torn itself apart over its schools and rebuilt itself more than once.
Before and after 1630
Shawmut was Massachusett country long before it was Boston. The people who gave the state its name fished the Charles and the Neponset and farmed corn, beans and squash along the bay; an epidemic carried by European ships killed most of them between about 1616 and 1619, and smallpox took more in 1633, the year their sachem Chickatawbut died. By then the Winthrop fleet had landed nearly a thousand Puritans in the harbor, in 1630. Many of the survivors later lived in John Eliot’s “praying towns” at Natick and Ponkapoag; their descendants, the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, are still here.
The Puritan town enforced its faith. The colony tried Anne Hutchinson for preaching in her own parlor and banished her in 1638; Mary Dyer, who had followed her out, came back a Quaker and was hanged in Boston on June 1, 1660, after defying three orders of banishment. In 1959 the same General Court that condemned her set Dyer’s bronze in front of the State House, facing the Common.
The road to revolution
Boston argued its way into independence: the Massacre of March 5, 1770, the Tea Party of December 16, 1773, the lanterns in Old North’s steeple on April 18, 1775, and Bunker Hill that June 17. On the night of March 4, 1776, Washington’s troops fortified Dorchester Heights, and on March 17 the British sailed away. Suffolk County still keeps Evacuation Day as a legal holiday.
The Freedom Trail
Sixteen official sites on a 2.5-mile red brick line from Boston Common to Charlestown, walked stop by stop in the trail chapter. ›
Old State House
Built in 1713 for the royal government; Boston first heard the Declaration of Independence from its balcony on July 18, 1776. ›
Dorchester Heights
The South Boston hilltop where Washington’s cannon forced the evacuation. A white marble monument, completed in 1902, now marks the spot. ›
Massachusetts Historical Society
Founded in 1791, it holds Paul Revere’s own account of his ride and the Adams family papers, with free exhibitions. ›
The abolitionist city
Massachusetts courts had effectively ended slavery by 1783 under the new state constitution. Beacon Hill’s north slope became home to Boston’s free Black community, and the city a capital of abolition: William Lloyd Garrison launched The Liberator here on January 1, 1831. In 1863 the 54th Massachusetts, among the first Black regiments of the Civil War, marched down Beacon Street to war.
The Black Heritage Trail
A 1.5-mile walk past the homes, schools and meeting places of the north slope, from the Shaw Memorial to Smith Court. ›
Museum of African American History
Its African Meeting House, opened in 1806, is the nation’s oldest standing Black church building; Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society there in 1832. ›
Commonwealth Museum
Keeps the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the world’s longest-serving written constitution still in force, whose declaration of rights the courts read as ending slavery. ›
The Women’s Heritage Trail
Its Downtown walk honors the abolitionists and suffragists who petitioned, lectured and organized here, from Maria Weston Chapman to Lucy Stone. ›
The immigrant city
Refugees from Ireland’s Great Famine poured into Boston in the late 1840s, and by 1885 the city had its first Irish-born mayor, Hugh O’Brien. Italian and Eastern European Jewish families followed from the 1880s, while Chinese immigrants settled near the old South Cove waterfront.
The Irish Heritage Trail
Twenty landmarks from the Rose Kennedy Garden on the waterfront to Fenway Park, including Robert Shure’s 1998 Irish Famine Memorial; the trail counts it at just over 3 miles, and the walk as this book maps it, with every detour, runs about 5. ›
The North End
Boston’s Italian quarter since the late 1800s. Immigrants from Sciacca, Sicily, began the Fisherman’s Feast in 1910 and families from Montefalcione began Saint Anthony’s in 1919; both return every August. ›
Vilna Shul
Jewish immigrants from the Vilna region laid its cornerstone in 1919. It is the last immigrant-era synagogue standing in Boston proper, with hand-painted murals uncovered during restoration. ›
Chinatown Gate
The paifang on Beach Street, a 1982 gift from Taiwan installed in 1988, marks New England’s only historic Chinatown, a Chinese community since the 1870s and 1880s. ›
The modern city
Postwar Boston rebuilt itself, not always gently. The city leveled nearly all of the residential West End in the late 1950s and replaced Scollay Square with Government Center. The Big Dig later buried the elevated highway that had cut downtown off from the harbor, and parks opened on top in 2008.
The hardest years came in between. On June 21, 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled that the School Committee had deliberately kept Boston’s schools segregated and ordered busing between neighborhoods, pairing South Boston High with Roxbury. The buses rolled that September under police escort, and the city’s image for a generation was fixed on April 5, 1976, when Stanley Forman photographed a white teenager swinging a flagpole at Ted Landsmark, a Black lawyer, on City Hall Plaza; The Soiling of Old Glory won the Pulitzer Prize. The court returned the schools to the city in 1985. J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground tells it family by family.
Boston City Hall
The 1968 concrete landmark by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, on the site of Scollay Square, and still the city’s most disputed building. The plaza in front is where the 1976 photograph was taken. ›
Rose Kennedy Greenway
About a mile and a half of gardens, fountains and public art where the highway once ran, tying the North End and the waterfront back to downtown. ›
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
I. M. Pei’s harborside memorial to the 35th president, dedicated in 1979 on Columbia Point; Kennedy’s great-grandfather was an Irish cooper in East Boston. ›
Common Ground
Lukas’s 1985 account of the busing years through three Boston families; the one book to read before the trails. ›
New England Holocaust Memorial
Six glass towers etched with numbers, dedicated in 1995 in a narrow park beside Faneuil Hall, on the Freedom Trail. ›