Boston [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThe city of Boston occupies a significant position in the development of America as a whole, for its history and the history of the U.S. began almost simultaneously and many of the events central to the formation of America as it is today took place in and around this early settlement. In 1630, only ten years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Boston was founded by Puritan Englishmen of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who for religious reasons, put the Atlantic Ocean between themselves and the Church of England and started a settlement which was named after Boston in Lincolnshire, the former home of a number of the immigrants. The settlers looked to the sea for their resources and the marsh-ridden Shawmut Peninsula soon became an important shipbuilding centre and fishing port. It was not long however, before the increasing prosperity of the colonial merchants drew the attention of London to the Massachusetts Bay and the British began pressing for laws to restrict the trading activities of the colonies, which were cutting into their own profits. By the middle of the eighteenth century 'taxation without representation is tyranny' had become the battle cry for revolution among the settlers and after the Boston Massacre of 1770, in which British troops fired on a crowd of civilian heclders, killing a number of them, the colony was ripe for action. The beginning of this action was marked by the famous Boston Tea Party: in 1773 as a protest against the Tea Act passed by the British Parliament, colonists disguised as Indians dumped three ship-loads of tea into the murky waters of Boston Harbour. On 18th April, 1775 the intrepid Paul Revere made his legendary ride to alert his countrymen that the redcoats were on the march in search of revolutionaries and their leaders, John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Because of this warning, the Minutemen were ready the next morning on Lexington Green for the historic battle that launched the War of Independence. The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on 17th June of that year and by the Autumn, Boston was a military garrison with General George Washington in charge of the Colonial army. The British were ousted and Boston, the settlement that had played so vital a role in the fight for liberty, was set free.From this point onwards Boston's development was considerable. By the close of the eighteenth century trade, which had suffered initially because British Imperial ports were placed out of bounds, began to pick up and the population swelled to 25,000. The architecture of Charles Bullfinch, who for more than a quarter of a century was also the head of the town government, began to gain international reputation as he set about skilfully transforming an 18th century English town into a 19th century American city and converting the upland pastures of Beacon Hill into a handsome new residential district that has survived to this day with relatively little change. In the 19th century also Boston established itself as a major shipbuilding and manufacturing centre, as well as an important stop on the 'underground railway' via which the Abolitionists smuggled slaves into Canada.The hilly Shawmut Peninsula to which the settlers had first come had been almost entirely surrounded by water with, to the west, an area of mudflats and marshes which were covered by tides at high water and known collectively as the Back Bay. As pressure of population caused an increasing demand for land however, hills were cut down to fill in coves and gradually so much new land was created that the once water-ringed peninsula became an indistinguishable part of the mainland. Today the original Back Bay is the midtown area (although still called Back Bay), all of South Boston with its docks and marine park is on land reclaimed from the bay; and what was once Noddle Island is now the vast Logan International Airport which has reached out into what was at one time the sea.