Massachusetts

A religious commonwealth founded to be an example, which became the country's engine of reform and of higher education. The Plymouth separatists of 1620 were followed by the far larger Massachusetts Bay colony from 1630, whose Puritan settlers came as families rather than as young men and who intended a godly society - John Winthrop's city upon a hill was a warning about being watched, not a boast. Government was for church members only, dissenters were expelled, four Quakers were hanged, and the Salem trials of 1692 killed twenty. The same seriousness produced the first college in the colonies at Harvard in 1636, the first printing press, and compulsory town schooling from 1647. Boston's merchant economy made it the centre of resistance to imperial taxation, and the confrontation ran from the massacre of 1770 through the tea in 1773 to the shots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Abolitionism, transcendentalism and the first American labour and women's rights conventions all had roots here. Massachusetts abolished slavery by judicial decision in the 1780s and legalised same-sex marriage first, in 2004. Irish and later Italian immigration remade Boston politics. The state has more colleges per head than any other. Boston is the capital and largest city. The state is officially a commonwealth. Its name comes from a Massachusett word for the hills near the bay. The Boston Public Library was the first large free municipal library in the country. Cape Cod curves out into the Atlantic. Basketball and volleyball were both invented in the state.

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