The cradle of the American Revolution — where the Boston Tea Party, the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and the first battle of the Revolutionary War happened within 25 miles of each other, and the world's oldest continuously run marathon has finished on Boylston Street since 1897
Boston (680,000; metro 4.9 million) is the intellectual and historical capital of New England — home to Harvard (1636, the oldest university in the US), MIT (1861), and more than 100 colleges and universities that make the metropolitan area the world's largest per-capita concentration of students and researchers. The Freedom Trail, a 2.5-mile red-line walking route through downtown, connects 16 sites of the American Revolution including Paul Revere's House (1680, the oldest remaining structure in downtown Boston), the Old North Church (1723, from whose steeple two lanterns signalled 'by sea'…
Boston was founded in 1630 by Puritan colonists from England led by John Winthrop, who called it 'a city upon a hill' in a sermon delivered aboard the Arbella — a phrase later echoed by Ronald Reagan to characterise America's role in the world. The Boston Massacre (5 March 1770), in which British soldiers killed five colonists including Crispus Attucks, and the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773), in which colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbour, were the two pivotal events that turned colonial resentment into revolution. The Battl…