Massachusetts.
The Bay
State.

Massachusetts begins at Plymouth Rock — or so the story goes. The Pilgrims who stepped ashore in 1620 were not the first Europeans in the region, nor even the first English settlers, but their story of religious exile, brutal first winter, and tentative peace with the Wampanoag people became the founding myth Americans reach for every November. What the myth elides is the century of conflict that followed: King Philip’s War in 1675, the bloodiest per-capita conflict in American history, nearly destroyed both sides.

Boston became the nerve center of colonial grievance. The Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party — each outrage was concentrated and amplified in this tight harbor city of printers, merchants, and Calvinist ministers who believed they were engaged in something close to a holy cause. Paul Revere rode. Sam Adams organized. On April 19, 1775, the shot heard round the world was fired at Lexington and Concord, and the revolution Massachusetts had been building for a decade became a war.

The 19th century made Massachusetts an intellectual and industrial powerhouse simultaneously. Lowell’s textile mills, powered by the Merrimack River, were the first large-scale factories in North America, drawing farm girls from across New England and immigrants from across the world. At the same time, Concord was producing Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Boston’s Brahmin class built the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony and Harvard Medical School. The state held both the loom and the library.

The abolition movement burned hottest in Massachusetts. William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator in Boston. Frederick Douglass gave his most important early speeches here. The 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, marched from Boston in May 1863 and led the assault on Fort Wagner with a valor that changed the debate about African American soldiers. Their story is carved in bronze on the Boston Common by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Today Massachusetts packs seven million people into 10,600 square miles and produces a disproportionate share of America’s medical research, higher education, biotechnology, and political talent. The Route 128 corridor and the Kendall Square biotech hub have made Greater Boston a global center of innovation. Cape Cod fills every summer with the world. The Berkshires attract artists and tourists year-round. And Boston remains exactly what it has always been: argumentative, proud, certain it is right, and usually closer to right than it has any business being.