Massachusetts
State of northeast USA; nicknamed Bay State/Old Colony State
Area:
21,500 sq km/8,299 sq mi
Capital:
Boston
Towns and Cities:
Worcester, Springfield, New Bedford, Brockton, Cambridge
Physical:
The Berkshire Hills; Cape Cod National Seashore
Features:
The islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, former whaling ports;
Cape Ann; Boston landmarks and the Freedom Trail; the town of Marblehead,
founded in 1629; Plymouth, with Mayflower II; Minute Man National Historical
Park and battlefields of Lexington and Concord, with a replica of the
Old North Bridge; Salem, site of 1690s witch trials; national historical
park at Lowell, a 19th-century mill town; New Bedford Whaling Museum;
Hancock Shaker Village; Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge; Old Sturbridge
Village, a re-creation of an early 19th-century farm village; historic
Deerfield and Deerfield Academy; Amherst, with Amherst College and the
Emily Dickinson homestead; Provincetown, with the Pilgrim Monument commemorating
the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620; Harvard University (Harvard College
1636), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge;
Williamstown, with Williams College (1793) and the Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute; Mount Holyoake College (1837), the first women's
college in the USA; Tanglewood Music Festival, summer home of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra; Colby Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts and
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Woods Hole, Cape Cod, an
international centre for marine research; National Basketball Hall of
Fame, Springfield
Industries:
Electronic, communications, and optical equipment; precision instruments;
non -electrical machinery; fish; cranberries; dairy products; tourism
Population:
(1995) 6,073,600
Famous People:
Samuel Adams, Louis Brandeis, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Robert Goddard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Winslow
Homer, William James, John F Kennedy, Robert Lowell, Paul Revere, Henry
Thoreau, Daniel Webster
History:
One of the original 13 states, it was first settled in 1620 by the
Pilgrims at Plymouth. After the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the
American Revolution began at Lexington and Concord 19 April 1775,
and the British evacuated Boston the following year. Massachusetts
became a state in 1788. In the early 19th century the first large-scale
factories were built here to turn out textiles. The state also
prospered from whaling and shipbuilding. Heavy immigration of
Irish, Germans, and Italians greatly modified the `YankeeŽ character
of Massachusetts by 1900. After World War II, high technology,
sophisticated services, and tourism replaced textiles, footwear,
and maritime activities as the mainstay of the economy.
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