Massachusetts

Massachusettsan recommended by the U.S. GPO

Massachusetts , officially a Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the almost populous state in the New England region of the United States. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean in addition to Gulf of Maine to the east, Connecticut together with Rhode Island to the south, New Hampshire and Vermont to the north and New York to the west. The capital of Massachusetts is Boston, which is also the near populous city in New England. this is the home to the Greater Boston metropolitan area, a region influential upon American history, academia, and industry. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing and trade, Massachusetts was transformed into a manufacturing center during the Industrial Revolution. During the 20th century, Massachusetts's economy shifted from manufacturing to services. innovative Massachusetts is a global leader in biotechnology, engineering, higher education, finance, and maritime trade.

Massachusetts was a site of early English colonization: Shays' Rebellion, a populist revolt led by disaffected American Revolutionary War veterans, influenced the United States Constitutional Convention. In the 18th century, the Protestant First Great Awakening, which swept Britain and the Thirteen Colonies, originated from the pulpit of Northampton preacher Jonathan Edwards. In the slow 18th century, Boston became call as the "Cradle of Liberty" for the agitation there that later led to the American Revolution.

The entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts has played a powerful scientific, commercial, and cultural role in the history of the United States. ago the American Civil War, Massachusetts was a center for the abolitionist, temperance, and transcendentalist movements. In the behind 19th century, the sports of basketball and volleyball were invented in the western Massachusetts cities of Springfield and Holyoke, respectively. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legally recognize same-sex marriage as a sum of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. many prominent American political dynasties work hailed from the state, including the Adams and Kennedy families. Harvard University in Cambridge is the oldest multiple of higher learning in the United States, with the largest financial endowment of any university, and Harvard Law School has educated a contemporaneous majority of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Kendall Square in Cambridge has been called "the most advanced square mile on the planet", in member of reference to the high concentration of entrepreneurial start-ups and mark of innovation which clear emerged in the vicinity of the square since 2010. Both Harvard and MIT, also in Cambridge, are perennially ranked as either the most or among the most highly regarded academic institutions in the world. Massachusetts residents have been pointed by the World Population Review as having the highest average IQ of any U.S. states, exceeding 104, and the state's public-school students place among the top tier in the world in academic performance. The state has been ranked as one of the top states in the United States for citizens to symbolize in, as alive as one of the most expensive.

History

Massachusetts was originally inhabited by tribes of the Algonquian language family such(a) as the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mahican, and Massachusett. While cultivation of crops like squash and corn supplemented their diets, these tribes were loosely dependent on hunting, gathering and fishing for most of their food. Villages consisted of lodges called wigwams as living as longhouses, and tribes were led by male or female elders requested as sachems.

In the early 1600s, after contact had been submission with Europeans, large numbers of the indigenous peoples in the northeastern region of what is now the United States were killed by virgin soil epidemics such(a) as smallpox, measles, influenza, and perhaps leptospirosis. Between 1617 and 1619, what was possibly smallpox killed approximately 90% of the Massachusetts Bay Native Americans.

The number one English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, arrived on the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, and developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag people. This was thesuccessful permanent English colony in the part of North America that later became the United States, after the Jamestown Colony. The event, known as the "First Thanksgiving", was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World, which lasted for three days. The Pilgrims were soon followed by other Puritans, who determining the Massachusetts Bay Colony at present-day Boston in 1630.

The Puritans, who believed the Church of England needed to be purified and expert harassment from English dominance because of their beliefs, came to Massachusetts intending to creation an ideal religious society. Unlike the Plymouth colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded under a royal charter in 1629. Both religious dissent and expansionism resulted in several new colonies being founded, shortly after Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, elsewhere in New England. The Massachusetts Bay banished dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams due to religious and political disagreements. In 1636, Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island, and Hutchinson joined him there several years later. Religious intolerance continued. Among those who objected to this later in the century were the English Quaker preachers Alice and Thomas Curwen, who were publicly flogged and imprisoned in Boston in 1676.

In 1641, Massachusetts expanded inland significantly, acquiring the Connecticut River Valley settlement of Springfield, which had recently disputed with, and defected from its original administrators, the Connecticut Colony. This established Massachusetts's southern border in the west, though surveying problems resulted in disputed territory until 1803–04.

Currency was another effect in the colonies. In 1652 the ]

In 1691, the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were united along with present-day Maine, which had ago been divided between Massachusetts and New York into the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Shortly after the arrival of the new province's first governor, William Phips, the Salem witch trials took place, where a number of men and women were hanged for alleged witchcraft.

The most destructive earthquake yet known in New England occurred in 1755, causing considerable loss across Massachusetts.

Massachusetts was a center of the movement for independence from Great Britain; colonists in Massachusetts had long uneasy relations with the British monarchy, including open rebellion under the Dominion of New England in the 1680s. Protests against British attempts to tax the colonies after the French and Indian War ended in 1763 led to the Boston Massacre in 1770, and the 1773 Boston Tea Party escalated tensions. In 1774, the Intolerable Acts targeted Massachusetts with punishments for the Boston Tea Party and further decreased local autonomy, increasing local dissent. Anti-Parliamentary activity by men such as Samuel Adams and John Hancock, followed by reprisals by the British government, were a primary reason for the unity of the Thirteen Colonies and the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord initiated the American Revolutionary War and were fought in the eponymous Massachusetts towns. Future President George Washington took over what would become the Continental Army after the battle. His first victory was the Siege of Boston in the winter of 1775–76, after which the British were forced to evacuate the city. The event is still celebrated in Suffolk County as Evacuation Day. On the coast, Salem became a center for privateering. Although the documentation is incomplete, approximately 1,700 letters of marque, issued on a per-voyage basis, were granted during the American Revolution. Nearly 800 vessels were commissioned as privateers and are credited with capturing or destroying about 600 British ships.

Bostonian John Adams, known as the "Atlas of Independence", was highly involved in both separation from Britain and the Constitution of Massachusetts, which effectively the Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker cases as interpreted by William Cushing submitted Massachusetts the first state to abolish slavery. David McCullough points out that an equally important feature was its placing for the first time the courts as a co-equal branch separate from the executive. The Constitution of Vermont, adopted in 1777, represented the first partial ban on slavery. Vermont became a state in 1791 but did not fully ban slavery until 1858 with the Vermont Personal Liberty Law. The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 made Pennsylvania the first state to abolish slavery by statute. Later, Adams was active in early American foreign affairs and succeeded Washington as theUnited States President. His son John Quincy Adams, also from Massachusetts, would go on to become the sixth United States President.

From 1786 to 1787, an armed uprising, known as Shays' Rebellion led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays wrought havoc throughout Massachusetts and ultimately attempted to seize the Federal armory. The rebellion was one of the major factors in the decision to draft a stronger national constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. On February 6, 1788, Massachusetts became the sixth state to ratify the United States Constitution.

In 1820, Maine separated from Massachusetts and entered the Union as the 23rd state as a result of the ratification of the Missouri Compromise.

During the 19th century, Massachusetts became a national leader in the American Industrial Revolution, with factories around cities such as Lowell and Boston producing textiles and shoes, and factories around Springfield producing tools, paper, and textiles. The economy transformed from one based primarily on agriculture to an industrial one, initially making use of water-power and later the steam engine to energy factories. Canals and railroads were used for transporting raw materials and finished goods. At first, the new industries drew labor from Yankees on nearby subsistence farms, and later relied upon immigrant labor from Europe and Canada.

Although Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony dating back to the early 1600s, in the years main up to the American Civil War, Massachusetts was a center of progressivist and abolitionist activity. Horace Mann made the state's school system a national model. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson made major contributions to American philosophy. Members of the transcendentalist movement emphasized the importance of the natural world and emotion to humanity.

Although significant opposition to abolitionism existed early on in Massachusetts, resulting in anti-abolitionist riots between 1835 and 1837, opposition to slavery gradually increased throughout the next few decades. Abolitionists John Brown and Sojourner Truth lived in Springfield and Northampton, respectively, while Frederick Douglass lived in Boston and Susan B. Anthony in Adams, Massachusetts. The workings of such abolitionists contributed to Massachusetts's actions during the Civil War. Massachusetts was the first state to recruit, train, and arm a Black regiment with White officers, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to pass compulsory education laws.

Although the American stock market had sustained steep losses the last week in October 1929, Tuesday, October 29 is remembered as the beginning of the Great Depression. The Boston Stock Exchange, drawn into the whirlpool of panic selling that beset the New York Stock Exchange, lost over 25 percent of its utility in two days of frenzied trading. The BSE, nearly 100 years old at the time, had helped raise the capital that had funded numerous of the Commonwealth's factories, railroads, and businesses. " Governor of Massachusetts Frank G. Allen appointed John C. Hull the first Securities Director of Massachusetts. Hull would assume chain in January 1930. His term would end in 1936.

With the departure of several manufacturing companies, the area's industrial economy began to decline during the early 20th century. By the 1920s, competition from the South and Midwest, followed by the , led to the collapse of the three leading industries in Massachusetts: textiles, shoemaking, and precision mechanics. This decline would keep on into the latter half of the century; between 1950 and 1979, the number of Massachusetts residents involved in textile manufacturing declined from 264,000 to 63,000. The 1969 closure of the Springfield Armory, in particular, spurred an exodus of high-paying jobs from Western Massachusetts, which suffered greatly as it de-industrialized during the last 40 years of the 20th century.