Chronological History of Massachusetts
1498 - English explorer John Cabot sails along Massachusetts coast
17th century
1602 - Bartholomew Gosnold explores coast.
1604 - Samuel de Champlain explores and maps coast.
1606 - James I grants charter to Plymouth Company to colonize Northern Virginia.
1607 - Three ships arrived from England with 104 men and boys. The settlers named the nearby river James, after their king and then settled on a narrow peninsula of the river, and named it Jamestown.
1614 - Capt. John Smith maps coast.
1620 - The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, arriving on the coast of Cape Cod instead of Virginia. After exploring the coast, the ship finally anchored in Plymouth harbor, and the Pilgrims established a settlement.
1621 - The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in Plymouth. This feast, after the first Plymouth harvest, set the model for our current day feast.
1628 - John Endecott founds Puritan settlement in what is now Salem.
1629 - Massachusetts Bay Company chartered.
1630 - In September 1630, Governor John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers traveled to the peninsula, known as Shawmut by the Algonquians, and founded Dorchester, the first part of the city of Boston.
1632 - Boston made capital of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1634 - Boston Common became the first public park in America.
1635 - The first American public secondary school, Boston Latin Grammar School, founded in Boston.
1636 - Harvard College was established in 1636. It was named for after John Harvard of Charlestown, who left half his estate to the new institution upon his death in 1638. Founded in Newtowne (now Cambridge).
1638- The first American printing press was set up in Cambridge by Stephen Daye.
1639 - The first Post Office in America was Richard Fairbanks' tavern in Boston. In 1939, it was named a repository for overseas mail. The first free American public school, the Mather school, founded in Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston.
1643 -Puritan colonies form New England Confederation to oppose Dutch and Indian attacks.
1646 - First American Ironworks established in Saugus.
1652 - Massachusetts general court rules that the territory of Maine lies within the boundaries of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, thus ending Maine's immediate hopes of independence.
1653 - The first American public library founded in Boston.
1656 - (Summer) Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans whip, imprison, and banish the first Quakers to arrive in the colony. Legislation in 1658 bars the Quakers from holding their services, called "meetings."
1659 - 27 October. Quakers William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson are hanged for refusing to leave Massachusetts. Mary Dyer, a follower of Anne Hutchinson and later a Quaker, is scheduled to hang with them but is reprieved at the last minute.
1660 - 1 June. Mary Dyer is hanged after defying an expulsion order by returning to Boston in May 1660.
1661 - Massachusetts continues to punish Quakers by hanging those who refuse to leave the colony. After a royal edict requires the Massachusetts authorities to release imprisoned Quakers and return them to England, the authorities instead allow them to leave for other colonies. By December, corporal punishment for Quakers and other dissenters is suspended in the Massachusetts Bay colony by order of Parliament.
1675 - King Philip's War brings Indian attacks on settlers.
1676 - The end of King Philip's War
1684 - Massachusetts charter annulled.
1686 - Dominion of New England established. Oxford became the first non-puritan town
1691 - Massachusetts granted new charter; becomes royal colony including Maine and Plymouth.
1692 - Witchcraft trials begin in Salem.
1693 - Society of Negroes is founded in Boston, Massachusetts.
1697 Massachusetts general court expresses official repentance for the witchcraft trials
1699 Peace treaty at Casco Bay, Maine, brings hostilities between the Abenaki Indians and the MA colony to an end.
18th century
1700: Boston City Committee discourages the importation of slaves.
1700: Massachusetts General Court passes a law forbidding any Catholic priest to be present in the colony under penalty of life imprisonment.
1704 - The first regularly issued American newspaper, The Boston News-Letter, published in Boston.
1705: Massachusetts law against interracial marriage
1708: The town of Boston rules that all strangers must post bond or leave town in an effort to evict paupers and newly arrived unskilled laborers. It raises the bond to 200 Pounds in the 1720s and maintains the fee into the 1730s.
1714: The New North Church is constructed.
1716 - America's first lighthouse, "The Boston Light" was built in Boston Harbor.
1716: Nov 26, The 1st lion exhibited in America was in Boston.
1717: Britain begins transporting felons to the colonies where some become unskilled labor in New England.
1718: British ships with indentured servants are turned away from Boston.
1717-1720: The Massachusetts General Court tells the Irish immigrants that they must leave the colony within seven months.
1721: Cotton Mather introduces the concept of vaccination during a smallpox epidemic in Boston
1723: The Old North (Christ Church) Church, the oldest continuously operational church in Boston, is constructed using a design by William Price.
1725: The Chamberlain House on Poplar Street (in Roslindale) is constructed and today is the oldest house there.
1726: Jeremiah Smith (b. 1705 Ireland) founds the first papermaking factory in the United States in Dorchester
1732: Gov. Jonathan Belcher tries to arrest a priest after Bostonians panic when Catholics are rumored to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.
1733: Jan 18, The 1st polar bear exhibited in America was in Boston.
1733: Jul 30, Society of Freemasons opened their 1st American lodge in Boston.
1737: Founding of the Charitable Irish Society by twenty-six "gentlemen of the Irish nation," making it the oldest Irish group in the United States.
1740: English preacher George Whitefield (1714-1770) ignites
the Great Awakening in Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) of Northampton,
Massachusetts is the other major figure in this
religious revival.
1743: Mar 14, The first recorded town meeting in America was held, at Faneuil Hall in Boston.
1754: William Garfit founds first bank in Boston.
1763 - End of Indian Wars in 1763 allows expansion in Western Massachusetts to a total of 184 towns.
1770 - Tensions aroused from British troops' presence in Boston, culminated in 5 men dying, when troops fired at colonists at the Customs House on March 5.
1773 - Boston Tea Party dumps tea into bay - Colonists at Faneuil Hall, in Boston, oppose taxes.
1774: Paul Revere installs the first church bells in America in the tower of the Old North Church. Later, during the Revolution, Robert
1775 - The first battle of the American Revolution fought in Lexington and Concord. The first ship of the U.S. Navy, the schooner "Hannah", commissioned in Beverly. Paul Revere's Midnight ride.
1776 - Colonial troops force British to evacuate Boston.
1780 - State constitution adopted; John Hancock becomes first elected governor.
1785 - Daniel Shay led a rebellion by farmers protesting excessive taxes, oppressive governmental systems and unfair laws and treatment of working people.
1788 - Massachusetts is sixth state to ratify the United States Constitution on Feb. 6, 1788.
1789 - The first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in Worcester.
1795 - State House built in Boston.
1796 - John Adams, born 1735 in Quincy, elected 2nd president of United States.
19th century
1800 - Back bay was created by a landfill to the west of Beacon Hill and Boston Common.
1800 - Social reformists met in Boston during the Transcendental Movement including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
1805 - Faneuil Hall is expanded.
1806 - The first church built by free blacks in America, the African Meeting House, opened on Joy Street in Boston.
1807 - Boston Athenaeum founded.
1807 - President Jefferson hurt Boston's trading economy by enacting a trade embargo against European nations.
1813 - Elbridge Gerry becomes the vice president. Elbridge was born in Marblehead and went to Harvard.
1814 - Vice President Elbridge Gerry dies.
1814 - At the Hartford convention New England states discussed
their
declining involvement in national affairs. They proposed to limit federal
power over embargoes and international trade.
1816 - A protective tariff was introduced that allowed Massachusetts manufacturing to flourish.
1820 - Maine separated from Massachusetts.
1822 - Lowell set up as factory town - Boston chartered.
1824 - John Quincy Adams, born 1767 in Quincy, elected 6th president of United States.
1825 - Boston founded the first high school for girls.
1826 - The first American railroad built in Quincy.
1827 - Francis Leiber opened the first swim school in America July 23, 1827. Among the first to enroll was John Quincy Adams.
1831 - The first abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison.
1833 - Constitutional amendment separates church and state; ends Puritanism in government.
1833 - Rhode Island born William Ellery Channing led the growth of Unitarianism from Boston.
1834 - The first book on baseball is published in Boston.
1837 - Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph based on
Morse Code, a simple pattern of "dots" and "dashes."
State Board of Education established under leadership of Horace Mann.
1839 - The first vulcanized rubber produced by Charles Goodyear in Woburn.
1840s - Irish immigration increased.
1840 - The typewriter was invented by Charles Thurber in Worcester.
1843 - Dorothea Dix reports inhumane condition is state prisons and asylums thus starting a reform movement.
1845 - The first sewing machine made by Elias Howe in Boston.
1845 - Henry David Thoreau left his family to live alone in a one room house that he constructed on Walden Pond near Concord.
1846 - William T.G. Morton, a Boston dentist, first demonstrated the use of anesthesia in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, using a specially designed glass inhaler containing an ether-soaked sponge.
1847 - Boston Athenaeum moved to its present location on Beacon Street.
February 21st, 1848 - John Quincy Adams died from a stroke when responding to a roll call in the congressional house chambers.
1850 - The first National Women's Rights Convention convenes in Worcester.
1850 - The Boston Athenaeum takes up residence in the Italian palazzo on Beacon Street that it calls home to this day. [DECLARED ELYSIUM]
1852 - First public library in the US opens in Boston as part of a Mekhet initiative allowing easily accessible storehouses of knowledge that have basements without windows…
1857 - Under Mayor John Bigelow, the project to drain the "Back Bay"
(or Charles River Flats) begins. The resulting "South End" neighborhood
has been described as the largest, most lasting Victorian district in the
nation.
1853 - Lewis and Harriet Hayden reveal to Harriet Beecher Stowe that their house on Beacon Hill is an important stop on the "underground railroad." It housed up to thirteen escaped slaves, and was trapped with two kegs of gunpowder so that the house could be destroyed if it were searched.
1860 - Irish immigration surges; by the start of the decade, more than 60,000 Irish have flocked to Boston, refugees from the Famine. Anti-Catholicism is rampant; members of the anti-immigrant American Party (known as the "Know-Nothings") are highly placed in political offices statewide.
1860s- It's at this point, chronologically, that the Sanctified begin making their push for power, using the rise of Catholicism as a blind. The struggle continues for the rest of the decade
1861 - America's greatest internal conflict - 3 million fought and 600,000 died in the War Between the States before General Lee surrendered his Confederate Army to General Grant at the village of Appomattox Court House General Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.
1863: The New North Church becomes St. Stephen's, a Roman Catholic place of worship and the only remaining Bulfinch-designed church in Boston.
1863 - University of Massachusetts chartered at Amherst.
1865 - Robert Ware, of MIT, began the first professional training program for architects. Prior to this, architects trained in Europe or learned through apprenticeship.
1866 - The first African-American legislators in New England elected to the General Court.
November 9, 1872 - A dry-goods store and hoop-skirt factory on Summer Street catches fire. The resulting blaze destroys 60 acres of property (776 buildings and approximately $60 million dollars -- $500 mil, in today's numbers -- in damage.) including the first Trinity Church. This devastates the Kindred population of the City; you can almost date the city "before" and "after" this event. Many people take advantage of the chaos to accomplish their goals. Since I don't know all the participants, details are sketchy, but the Carthians take a big hit at this point, and the Lancia Sanctum get to shore up their base.
1875 - The first American Christmas card printed by Louis Prang in Boston.
1876 - The first telephone demonstrated by Alexander Graham Bell in Boston.
1877 - Helen Magill White becomes the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in the U.S. (Boston University)
1881 - The Country Club in Brookline became the first country club in America dedicated to "outdoor pursuits".
1881 - The Boston Symphony Orchestra is founded by Henry Lee Higginson.
1886 - The first transformer demonstrated by William Stanley in Great Barrington.
1889 - Noted socialite and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner turns her house at Fenway Court into a home for masterpieces. It remains so.
1891 - The first basketball game played in Springfield. The Kennedy Biscuit Works (later Nabisco) used a machine invented by James Henry Mitchell to mass- produce the first Fig Newton Cookies and named it for the town of Newton, MA.
1892 - The first successful gasoline-powered automobile perfected by Charles and Frank Duryea in Springfield.
1895 - The first volleyball game played in Holyoke.
1896 - The first American public beach established in Revere.
1897 - The first successful American subway system opened in Boston.
1897 - First Boston Marathon run.
20th century
1903 - First Trans-Atlantic Radio Broadcast made by from Marconi Station at Wellfleet when President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain exchanged greetings.
1907 - World's first motorized fire wagon developed by Knox Manufacturing Company.
1912 - Textile workers go on strike in Lawrence
1914 - Canal links Cape Cod Bay with Buzzards Bay.
1919 - Great Molasses Flood
1920 - Governor Calvin Coolidge elected vice-president; becomes 30th president of United States in 1923.
1924 - L. Sherman Adams introduced the world's first mutual fund.
1925 - Edith Nourse Rogers (Republican - Massachusetts) was the first woman to serve in the U. S. House of Representatives. She was the longest serving women in House and introduced the GI Bill of Rights among other major initiatives.
1920-27 - Sacco-Vanzetti case gains world attention.
1926 - The first successful liquid fuel rocket launched by Dr. Robert Goddard in Auburn.
1928 - The first computer, a non-electronic "differential analyzer," developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush of M.I.T. in Cambridge.
1930 - Clarence Birdseye conducted first test of his quick-freezing process, including twenty-six different vegetables, fruits, fish, and meats. Ruth Wakefield invented the first chocolate chip cookie at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Ma. by adding cut up pieces of chocolate to her butter drop cookies.
1944 - And, not to be outdone by M.I.T., Howard Aiken of Harvard developed the first automatic digital computer.
1947 - Percy Spencer of Raytheon Corp. invented the microwave oven, the Radarange. The first oven was 750 lb and 5-1/2 feet tall. Today over 200 million microwaves are in use. Edwin Land demonstrates "one-step photography system" - the first Poloroid Land Camera. Dr. Sidney Farber introduced chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer, achieving the first cases of remission of acute childhood leukemia.
1950s - The black population began to increase nearly fourfold.
1954 - First successful Kidney transplant between twins at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.
1957 - Massachusetts Turnpike opened.
1958 - For the first time Massachusetts elects both a Democratic governor and legislature.
1960s - Manufacturing jobs in Boston dropped dramatically while low paying clerical and service jobs increased.
1960 - John F. Kennedy, born 1917 in Brookline, elected 35th president of United States; assassinated in 1963.
1960 - Downtown Boston changed as the West End was demolished. Urban renewal programs were started in Boston.
1961 - Massachusetts Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elected president and Lyndon Baines Johnson became vice president.
1961 - The first nuclear-powered surface vessel, USS Long Beach
CG(N) 9, launched at Quincy.
***********
Between June 14, 1962 and January 4, 1964, thirteen single women in the Boston
area were victims of either a single serial killer or possibly several killers.
At least eleven of these murders were popularly known as the victims of the
Boston Strangler. While the police did not see all of these murders as the
work of a single individual, the public did. All of these women were murdered
in their apartments, had been sexually molested, and were strangled with articles
of clothing. With no signs of forced entry, the women apparently knew their
assailant(s) or, at least, voluntarily let him
(them) in their homes. These were respectable women who for the most
part led quiet, modest lives.
This page has a list of the victims and when they died.
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4003/boston.html
Albert De Salvo confessed to the murders but was never put on
trial.
There was strong evidence that he did not commit the crimes.
*********
1962 - Steve Russell of MIT writes the first computer game,
Spacewar.
November 22nd, 1963 - President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated allegedly
by Lee Harvey Oswald. President Kennedy was shot while campaigning in a motorcade
driven through Dallas Texas.
1968 - I. M. Pey's architecture appeared in the newly built government center.
June 1968 - Robert Kennedy (JFK's brother, a presidential candidate raised in Brookline MA) assassinated.
1969 - Bolt Beranek & Newman deploys ARPANET, precursor to the Internet.
1971 - Ray Tomlinson of Beranek & Newman sent the first email. The first email message was "QWERTYUIOP" and was sent between two side by side computers connected via ARPANET.
1974 - Federal court orders the integration of Boston public schools Busing program to integrate Boston public schools sparks white boycotts and violent demonstrations.
1976 - Boston was the first city in America to celebrate New
Year's Eve with a "First Night" event.
The Kurzweil Reading Machine is the first successful commercial product to
incorporate artificial intelligence to create a print-to-speech reading achine
for the blind.
1979 - The first PC-based electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc is developed by Daniel Brickman
1980 - Walter Gilbert was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1980 for discovering a technique to decode DNA.
1988 - Governor Michael Dukakis signs bill guaranteeing health insurance to all state residents Construction begins on 6-billion-dollar sewage-treatment project to clean up Boston Harbor Voters reject proposal to shut down the state's two nuclear power plants Dukakis becomes Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
The Above was found at
http://www.shgresources.com/ma/timeline/
http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl310/1651.htm
http://www.boston-online.com/History/20th_Century/index.html
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/mus/musexe/mustim/timidx.htm
http://www.bostonfamilyhistory.com/
http://timelines.ws/
