17th Century: A Revolutionary Vision

The founding identity of the Massachusetts colony in 1630 was, in the words of its first governor John Winthrop, “as a city on a hill… We shall be made a story and a by-word through the world….” The colonists claimed the land of the Massachusetts tribe, who had been decimated by disease following contact with traders. Their land extended from Plymouth to the Merrimack River, and included the Neponset, Charles, and Concord River basins. For almost four centuries, this region—Greater Boston—has fulfilled Winthrop’s prophetic vision for an outsized role in world events.

18th Century: The American Revolution

From 1760, when James Otis argued against the writs of assistance, and, later, against “taxation without representation,” to Sam Adams’ protests, which led to the 1773 Boston Tea Party, to the “shot heard around the world” in Lexington, and Charlestown’s Battle of Bunker Hill, Greater Boston was the heart of the American revolution. After the new nation’s founding, Quincy native John Adams wrote the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Constitution, the oldest Constitution still in use and a model for the nation’s.

19th Century: America’s Industrial Revolution

Britain’s Industrial Revolution leapfrogged the Atlantic in the person of Samuel Slater, an immigrant to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, who built a water-powered mill for spinning cotton yarn. Westboro native Eli Whitney then invented the cotton gin, automating the separation of cottonseeds from fiber (strengthening the hold of slavery in the South). By 1850, Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell established mills in Waltham, and founded the “mill city” of Lowell, where canals powered waterwheels in 40 buildings with 10,000 looms operated by waves of immigrants. By the end of the century, Boston factories turned out textiles, shoes, furniture, and clothing.

20th Century: The Information Age

Following the loss of its major industries to the low-cost South, Greater Boston transitioned to become, in the run up to and after World War II, a leader in high-tech defense systems based on early computers and the software to run them. America’s great science universities—MIT and Stanford—then spawned a new generation of innovators and a new knowledge economy, with high-tech clusters of research and development along Route 128 on the East Coast and in Silicon Valley on the West. The Internet and the World Wide Web boosted these regions into global leadership roles. Once again, immigrants augmented the region’s innovative capacity as well as its labor force.