Boston

Boston is the oldest major city in the United States and the capital of New England in all but name. Founded by Puritans in 1630 on a hilly, almost-island peninsula reaching into a deep, sheltered harbor, it grew into the great port of colonial America and the cradle of the Revolution. Its superb natural harbor, guarded by islands, made it a center of trade, shipbuilding, and fishing from the start.

Boston has literally remade its own geography. The original peninsula was so cramped that, over the 1800s, the city sheared the tops off its hills and used the dirt to fill in the surrounding bays and mudflats — most famously creating the Back Bay neighborhood from open water. The result is a compact, dense old city, walkable and tangled, wrapped around the harbor at the mouth of the Charles River.

Today Boston anchors a metro of more than four and a half million and is a world center of universities, medicine, and technology, its identity still bound to the harbor and the historic core. Among major American cities it is unusually old, dense, and pedestrian-scaled.

• Massachusetts
  The Bay State, cultural anchor of New England located in