Boston
The area’s many colleges and universities make Boston an international center of higher education, including law, medicine, engineering, and business, and the city is considered to be a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, with nearly 2,000 start-ups. Boston’s economic base also includes finance, professional and business services, biotechnology, information technology, and government activities. Households in the city claim the highest average rate of philanthropy in the United States; businesses and institutions rank among the top in the country for environmental sustainability and investment. The city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States as it has undergone gentrification, though it remains high on world livability rankings.
Boston’s early European settlers had first called the area Trimountaine (after its “three mountains,” only traces of which remain today) but later renamed it Boston after Boston, Lincolnshire, England, the origin of several prominent colonists. The renaming on September 7, 1630 (Old Style) was by Puritan colonists from England who had moved over from Charlestown earlier that year in quest of fresh water. Their settlement was initially limited to the Shawmut Peninsula, at that time surrounded by the Massachusetts Bay and Charles River and connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. The peninsula is thought to have been inhabited as early as 5000 BC.
Boston (pronounced /ˈbɒstən/ (About this sound listen) BOSS-tən) is the capital and most populous city[8] of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. It is also the seat of Suffolk County, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999.[9] The city proper covers 48 square miles (124 km2) with an estimated population of 673,184 in 2016,[3] making it the largest city in New England and the 22nd most populous city in the United States.[2] The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country.[10] Alternately, as a Combined Statistical Area (CSA), this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States.