Boston, Massachusetts (1659)

Boston Harbour ['bostən 'ha:bə] – Бостонская гавань

Massachusetts [,mжsə't∫u:səts] – Массачусетс, штат

The Stamp Act – закон о гербовом сборе

Boston Massacre ['bostən 'mжsəkə] – Бостонская бойня

John Smith, a Pilgrim Father from Mayflower, visited Boston Harbour in 1614. The location seemed rather suitable for commerce and defence, and it was chosen for the settlement called Boston, after the borough of that name in Lincolnshire, England.

The population was about 20 thousand in the years immediately before the War of Independence. At that time Boston was the most flourishing of North America. It built ships and carried goods for the colonies, it traded with Europe and the West Indies.

Being one of the oldest cities and centres of the colonists' struggle for independence in the United States, Boston is full of historic events. Opposition to the measures of the British government for taxing and oppressing the colonies began in Boston. The Stamp Act, passed in 1765, was repealed next year in Boston. British troops were quartered in the town in 1768. In 1770, on the 5th of March, a number of citizens were killed or wounded by the soldiers, who fired into a crowd. This incident is known as the "Boston Massacre". The Tea Act of 1773, when a party of citizens threw three cargoes of tea into the waters of the Boston Harbour, also took place here.

The city lies on Massachusetts Bay, on what was once a peninsula attached to the mainland by a narrow, marshy neck. On the north is the Charles River, which widens here into a broad inner harbour or Back Bay.

The population of the city is about a million people, it numbers 4 million including its suburbs. There are some leading educational institutions tin Boston. They are Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the largest purely scientific and technical school in the country; Boston University; the New England Conservatory of Music, the largest in the U.S.; and several departments of the famous Harvard University, located in the suburbs of Boston. There is the Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1630 in Boston, the Philharmonic and the Symphony Orchestra, organized in 1881, etc. As a musical centre Boston rivals New York.

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