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Boston, Springfield, Worcester, Cambridge, Woburn, Lynn, New Bedford, Brockton, Chicopee, Fall River, Framingham, Lowell, Haverhill, Lawrence, Middleboro, Quincy, Waltham, Weymouth, Andover, Amherst, Centerville, Groton, Northampton, Pittsfield, Plymouth, Salem, Somerville, Watertown, Westborough, Arlington
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Four themes
dominate the history of this small but influential state:
the importance of individual and personal freedom and
liberty, mercan tile activity and entrepreneurship,
inventiveness,and industrial genius, and pioneering social
action.
The pre-European population of Massachusetts was a small
number of relatively independent native American tribes.
About 30,000 Indians from the Algonquian tribes lived in the
area. When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, many had already
died of diseases brought to America from the Europeans. Only
7,000 Native Americans remained in Massachusetts at that
time.
Early European Exploration and Colonization The coast of
what is now Massachusetts was probably skirted by Norsemen
in the 11th century, but in the late 16th century, European
ships explored the New England coast, led by Giovanni da
Verrazano in 1524 and Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602. Their
explorations were based in part upon the information of
Europeans on fishing voyages who had reached North America
during the 16th century.
Interest in the commercial exploitation of New England grew
in Europe, especially in England. The first permanent
settlers in Massachusetts, however, were not fortune hunters
but the religious group known as the Pilgrims, whose first
land- fall was Cape Cod rather than their original Virginia
destination.
In December 1620 they landed at Plymouth, where they
established a colony according to terms drawn up in the
Mayflower Compact before debarking. Their first governor,
John Carver, died the next year, but under his successor,
William Bradford, the Plymouth Colony took firm hold.
Weathering early difficulties, the colony eventually
prospered. The Pilgrims were soon followed by other English
settlers. The Dorchester Company founded a colony at
Gloucester (1623)on Cape Ann and, after Gloucester's
failure, at Naumkeag (Salem, 1626). In 1628 a party of
Puritans led by John Endecott settled at Salem under the
auspices of the New England Company.
In 1629 the New England Company was reorganized as the
Massachusetts Bay Company after receiving a more secure
patent from the crown. In 1630 John Winthrop led the first
large Puritan migration from England (900 settlers on 11
ships). Boston supplanted Salem as capital of the colony,
and Winthrop replaced Endecott as governor. Winthrop and,
together with cleric John Cotton, dominated its affairs for
the next two decades. Puritanism was the overriding
religiopolitical force in the Bay Colony, whose leaders
sought to establish a Bible commonwealth.
Citizenship(called freemanship)was restricted (until 1664)to
church members. Religious dissenters, most notably Anne
Hutchinson, and Roger Williams, were banished from the
colony. Within the framework of religious restriction,
however, the colony early developed representative
institutions.
In 1632 the freemen gained the right to elect the governor
directly, and in 1634 the freemen of each town won the right
to send deputies to the General Court. Throughout this early
period new immigrants arrived, settling along the coast and
a short distance inland. Farming, lumbering, and fishing
were the principal occupations. Native American resentment
of the Puritan presence and ovement into the interior
resulted in the Pequot War (see Pequot ) of 1637, after
which the four Puritan colonies (Massachusetts Bay,
Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven) formed the New England
Confederation , the first voluntary union of American
colonies. In 1675-76, the confederation broke the power of
the Native Americans of southern New England in King
Philip's War . In the course of the French and Indian Wars ,
however, frontier settlements such as Deerfield were
devastated.
In 1643 the Bay Colony formed the New England Confederation
with Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven colonies to
coordinate defense.The confederation acted most effectively
during King Philip's War (1675-76). Continual disagree ments
arose between the colonists and the English
government,especially after the restoration of the English
monarchy in 1660.
Finally, in 1684, the colony's charter was revoked, and in
1686 the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies were
included in the Dominion of New England under Sir Edmund
Andros. News of the Glorious Revolution in England prompted
uprisings against Andros and the dissolution of the Dominion
in 1689. Two years later a royal charter was issued that
incorporated Plymouth Colony and the Province of Maine,
within Mass achusetts but placed the extended colony under a
royal governor and removed the religious qualification for
voting, although Congregationalism remained the established
religion. Widespread anxiety over loss of the original
charter contributed to the witchcraft panic that reached its
climax in Salem in the summer of 1692. Nineteen persons were
hanged and one crushed to death for refusing to confess to
the practice of witchcraft. The Salem trials ended abruptly
when colonial authorities, led by Cotton Mather , became
alarmed at their excesses.
Massachusetts experienced accelerated growth in the early
18th century; settlements arose in the interior, and the
Connecticut Valley was settled. Mills were built along the
smaller rivers and streams to grind grain, saw logs, forge
iron and process wool. Seaport towns grew and prospered as a
lucrative overseas trade florished. Ships carried timber and
salt fish to the Caribbean and returned with molasses and
sugar. Rum, distilled in Medford and Newburyport, was
carried to West Africa along with cloth and simple utensils
to be traded for slaves who were, in turn, carried to the
Carribean Islands and South America. These routes came to be
known as the "Triangular Trade."
Massachusetts has played a significant role in American
history since the Pilgrims, seeking religious freedom,
founded Plymouth Colony in 1620.
Rich shipowners and sea captains competed to build the
grandest houses along the shore. From the Revolution to the
Civil War. The various taxes put forth by the British after
1730 for replenishment of the British treasury were
unpopular in thriving Massachusetts. As one of the most
important of the 13 colonies, Massachusetts became a leader
in resisting British oppression.
In 1761 James Otis opposed a Massachusetts superior court's
issuance of writs of assistance (general search warrants to
aid customs officers in enforcing collection of duties on
imported sugar), arguing that this action violated the
natural rights of Englishmen and was therefore void. He thus
helped set the stage for the political controversy which,
coupled with economic grievances, culminated in the American
Revolution. In Massachusetts a bitter struggle developed
between the governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and the
anti-British party in the legislature led by Samuel Adams,
John Adams, James Otis, and John Hancock. The Stamp Act
(1765) and the Townshend Acts (1767) preceded the Boston
Massacre (1770), and the Tea Act (1773) brought on the
Boston Tea Party . The rebellious colonials were punished
for this with the Intolerable Acts (1774), which troops
under Gen. Thomas Gage were sent to enforce.
Through committees of correspondence Massachusetts and the
other colonies had been sharing their grievances, and in
1774 they called the First Continental Congress at
Philadelphia for united action. The mounting tension in
Massachusetts exploded in Apr., 1775, when General Gage
decided to make a show of force with a search-and-destroy
mission. Warned by Paul Revere and William Dawes, the
Massachusetts militia engaged the British force at Lexington
and Concord (see Lexington and Concord, battles of ).
Patriot militia from other colonies hurried to
Massachusetts, where, after the battle of Bunker Hill (June
17, 1775), George Washington took command of the patriot
forces.
In June 1775 the Battle of Bunker Hill proved to be a costly
victory for the British. In 1776 they evacuated Boston, and
fighting ended on Massachusetts soil.
Victorious in the Revolution, the colonies faced depressing
economic conditions. Nowhere were those conditions worse
than in W Massachusetts, where discontented Berkshire
farmers erupted in Shays's Rebellion in 1786. The uprising
was promptly quelled, but it frightened conservatives into
support of a new national constitution that would displace
the weak government created under the Articles of
Confederation; this constitution was ratified by
Massachusetts in 1788.
Independence had closed the old trade routes within the
British Empire, but new ones were soon created, and trade
with China became especially lucrative. Boston and lesser
ports boomed, and the prosperous times were reflected
politically in the commonwealth's unwavering adherence to
the Federalist party, the party of the dominant commercial
class. European wars at the beginning of the 19th cent. at
first further stimulated maritime trade but then led to
interference with American shipping. To avoid war Congress
resorted to Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807 , but its
provisions dealt a severe blow to the economy of
Massachusetts and the rest of the nation.
These men were leaders in the Revolution, and the state
continued to provide leadership for the young American
republic. Massachusetts had regained its economic momentum
when the embargoes and trade restrictions of the early 19th
century again curbed overseas trade. General opposition to
the War of 1812 brought on talk of secession at the Hartford
Convention (1814-15).
The war finally ended with minimal help from Massachusetts,
however, and economic growth again accelerated. The decades
before the Civil War were prosperous ones. Farming spread
into the farthest valleys of the Berkshires, often into
areas ill suited to cultivation. Canals, toll roads, and
railroads were built connecting all of the principal cities.
Economy for the next century, gained its initial momentum
under capitalists like Francis Cabot Lowell.
Workers were first recruited from local farms and villages,
but in the mid-1840s the first non-English, immigrants, the
Irish, arrived. The long British cultural hege-mony was
over. The mills cities grew rapidly, sometimes doubling
their population in less than a decade. As waterpower sites
proved inadequate for large-scale factory expansion, steam
engines powered by coal were used.
Nevertheless, mill workers expressed growing discontent over
working conditions. The Civil War was entered with great
enthusiasm, especially because Massachusetts had a long
history of abolitionist sentiment. The state was a major
arsenal for the war, with guns, blankets, tents, and shoes
produced in vast quantities.
World War I, which caused a vast increase in industrial
production, improved the lot of workers, but not of Boston
policemen, who staged and lost their famous strike in 1919.
For his part in breaking the strike, Gov. Calvin Coolidge
won national fame and went on to become vice president and
then president, the third Massachusetts citizen (after John
Adams and John Quincy Adams) to hold the highest office in
the land. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case , following the police
strike, attracted international attention, as liberals raged
over the seeming lack of regard for the spirit of the law in
a state that had given the nation such an eminent jurist as
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935). Labor unions finally came
into their own in the 1930s under the New Deal.
The late 19th century was the state's greatest industrial
period. Massachusetts was a national leader in the
production not only of textiles and shoes but also of
textile and shoemaking mach inery, silverware, machine
tools, glass, paper, rubber products, locomotives, guns, and
fire en gines. From 1900 to 1910, however, many factories,
which had become increasingly obsolescent, closed. Textile
companies established new mills and new corporate
headquarters in the southern states. The tenements of the
mill cities were aging and unable to meet the most modest
health and building standards.
Service industries, however, were beginning to assume a new
role in the Massachusetts economy. Banking and insurance,
important in the era of industrial expansion and
transportation growth,reached out for new markets in the
West. Retailing and wholesaling expanded to serve the new
urban populations. Many office and clerical jobs were
created in cities like Boston, Worcester, and Springfield.
The Depression of the 1930s was especially severe in those
communities already hard hit by the closing of textile and
shoe factories. World War II temporarily reversed this trend
as industry spurted forward again during World War II, and
in the postwar era the state continued to develop.
In the post-World War II era Massachusetts has played a
national leadership role in social and political activities.
Agriculture and fishing are in decline, but beginning in the
1950s, Massachusetts's economy generally has been
revitalized, with electronics,nonelectrical machinery, and
computer-oriented industries stimulating growth. Service
industries have continued to expand, especially in the areas
of banking, insurance, health care, and higher education.
Politically, the state again assumed national importance
with the 1960 election of Senator John F. Kennedy as the
nation's 35th President. In 1974, Michael S. Dukakis, a
Democrat, was elected governor. He lost to Edward King in
1978, but won again in 1982 and was reelected in 1986. In
1988 he ran for president, losing to George H. W. Bush.
Dukakis decided not to run again for governor.
At the end of the decade effects of a nationwide recession
and the burden of a huge state budget hit Massachusetts
hard, but in the 1990s there was a substantial economic
recovery, spearheaded by growth in small high-tech
companies.
The principal problems facing the state, however, lie in its
urban areas, where the incidence of violent crime, the
distribution and use of illegal drugs, and the general
deterioration of social services are on the increase.
Today, leaders are striving to improve air and water
pollution, housing shortages, and racial issues.
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