Greater Boston in the context of "Massachusett"

Boston is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. It serves as the cultural and financial center of New England, a region of the Northeastern United States. Boston has an area of 48.4 sq mi (125 km) and a population of 675,647 as of the 2020 census, making it the third-most populous city in the Northeastern United States after New York City and Philadelphia. The larger Greater Boston metropolitan statistical area had a population of 4.9 million in 2023, making it the largest metropolitan area in New England and the eleventh-largest in the United States.

Boston was founded on Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by English Puritan settlers, who named the city after the market town of Boston, Lincolnshire in England. During the American Revolution and Revolutionary War, Boston was home to several seminal events, including the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), Paul Revere's midnight ride (1775), the Battle of Bunker Hill (1775), and the Siege of Boston (1775–1776).

Tufts University is a private research university in Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, with additional facilities in Boston and Grafton, as well as Talloires, France. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. For much of the 20th century, Jackson College for Women was the coordinate college of Tufts. Tufts remained a small liberal arts college until the 1970s, when it became a larger research university offering doctorates in several disciplines.

Tufts enrolls over 13,000 students. It offers over 90 undergraduate and 160 graduate programs across ten schools in the greater Boston area and from a campus in France. It has the country's oldest graduate school of international relations, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The largest school is the School of Arts and Sciences, which includes both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, which is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The School of Engineering offers an entrepreneurial focus through its Gordon Institute. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and is a member of the Association of American Universities.

New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick to the northeast and Quebec to the north. The Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Ocean are to the east and southeast, and Long Island Sound is to the southwest. Boston is New England's largest city and the capital of Massachusetts. Greater Boston, comprising the Boston–Worcester–Providence Combined Statistical Area, houses more than half of New England's population; this area includes Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England; Manchester, New Hampshire, the largest city in New Hampshire; and Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of and largest city in Rhode Island. In 1620, the Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony, the second successful settlement in British America after the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, founded in 1607. Ten years later, Puritans established Massachusetts Bay Colony north of Plymouth Colony. Over the next 126 years, people in the region fought in four French and Indian Wars until the English colonists and their Iroquois allies defeated the French and their Algonquian allies.

In the late 18th century, political leaders from the New England colonies initiated resistance to Britain's taxes without the consent of the colonists. Residents of Rhode Island captured and burned a British Royal Navy ship which was enforcing unpopular trade restrictions, and residents of Boston threw British tea into the harbor. Britain responded with a series of punitive laws stripping Massachusetts of self-government which the colonists called the "Intolerable Acts". These confrontations led to the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775 and the expulsion of the British authorities from the region in spring 1776. The region played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and it was the first region of the U.S. transformed by the Industrial Revolution, initially centered on the Blackstone and Merrimack river valleys.

Interstate 95 (I-95) is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the East Coast of the United States, running from U.S. Route 1 (US 1) in Miami, Florida, north to the Houlton–Woodstock Border Crossing between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The highway largely parallels the Atlantic coast and US 1, except for the portion between Savannah, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., and the portion between Portland and Houlton in Maine, both of which follow a more direct inland route.

I-95 serves as the principal road link between the major cities of the Eastern Seaboard. Major metropolitan areas along its route include Miami, Jacksonville, and Savannah in the Southeast; Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington–Philadelphia, Newark, and New York City in the Mid-Atlantic; and New Haven, Providence, Boston, and Portland in New England. The Charleston, Wilmington, and Norfolk–Virginia Beach metropolitan areas, the three major coastal metros bypassed by the highway's inland portion, are connected to I-95 by I-26, I-40, and I-64, respectively.

Plymouth (/ˈplɪməθ/ PLIM-əth; historically also spelled as Plimouth and Plimoth) is a town in and the county seat of Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States. Located in Greater Boston, the town holds a place of great prominence in American history, folklore, and culture, and is known as "America's Hometown". Plymouth was the site of the colony founded in 1620 by the Mayflower Pilgrims, where New England was first established. It is the oldest municipality in New England and one of the oldest in the United States. The town has served as the location of several prominent events, one of the more notable being the First Thanksgiving feast. Plymouth served as the capital of Plymouth Colony from its founding in 1620 until the colony's merger with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. The English explorer John Smith named the area Plymouth (after the city in South West England) and the region 'New England' during his voyage of 1614 (the accompanying map was published in 1616). It was a later coincidence that, after an aborted attempt to make the 1620 trans-Atlantic crossing from Southampton, the Mayflower finally set sail for America from Plymouth, England.

Plymouth is located approximately 40 miles (64 km) south of Boston in a region known as the South Shore. Throughout the 19th century, the town thrived as a center of rope making, fishing, and shipping, and was home to the Plymouth Cordage Company, formerly the world's largest rope making company. It continues to be an active port, but today its major industry is healthcare and social services. The town is served by Plymouth Municipal Airport and contains the Pilgrim Hall Museum, the oldest continually operating museum in the United States. It is the largest municipality in Massachusetts by area, and the largest in southern New England. The population was 61,217 at the 2020 U.S. census. It is one of two seats of Plymouth County, the other being Brockton.

A road verge is a strip of groundcover consisting of grass or garden plants, and sometimes also shrubs and trees, located between a roadway and a sidewalk. Verges are known by dozens of other names such as grass strip, nature strip, curb strip, berm, park strip, or tree lawn, the usage of which is often quite regional.

Road verges are often considered public property, with maintenance usually being a municipal responsibility. Some local authorities, however, require abutting property owners to help maintain (e.g. watering, mowing, edging, trimming/pruning and weeding) their respective verge areas, as well as clean the adjunct footpaths and gutters, as a form of community work.

Brookline (/ˈbrʊklaɪn/ ) is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States, and part of the Boston metropolitan area. An exclave of Norfolk County, Brookline borders six of Boston's neighborhoods: Brighton, Allston, Fenway–Kenmore, Mission Hill, Jamaica Plain, and West Roxbury. The city of Newton borders Brookline to the west. It is known for being the birthplace of John F. Kennedy.

The land which comprises what is today Brookline was first settled in 1638 as a hamlet in Boston, known as Muddy River (as it was settled on the west side of the river of the same name). It was incorporated as a separate town with the name of Brookline in 1705. In 1873, Brookline had a contentious referendum in which it voted to remain independent from Boston. The later annexations of Brighton and West Roxbury, both in 1874, and that of Hyde Park in 1912, eventually made Brookline into an exclave of Norfolk County. The town had a history of racial discrimination in zoning, which has led to a disproportionately wealthy population, and a Black population of 2.5%.

The Providence metropolitan area (Providence MSA) is a region extending into eight counties in two states. Its core is in the states of Rhode Island and Massachusetts; its largest city is Providence, Rhode Island. With an estimated population of 1,622,520, exceeding that of Rhode Island by slightly over 60%, the Providence MSA is the 38th largest metropolitan area in the United States. The MSA covers all of Rhode Island and Bristol County, Massachusetts, with an average population density of 2300 per mi (888 per km).

The region's Gross Metropolitan Product is the country's 42nd largest at $64.7 billion, just above the Gross State Product of the entire state of Hawaii. Since 2006, the Providence metropolitan area has been officially included in the Greater Boston Combined Statistical Area (CSA), the sixth-largest CSA in the country, with over eight million residents.

Providence County is the most populous county in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 660,741, or 60.2% of the state's population. Providence County contains the city of Providence, the state capital of Rhode Island and the county's (and state's) most populous city, with an estimated 190,934 residents in 2020. Providence County is included in the Providence metropolitan area, which in turn constitutes a portion of Greater Boston. As of 2010, the center of population in Rhode Island is located in Providence County, in the city of Cranston.

Springfield is the most populous city in Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States, and its county seat. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers: the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern Mill River. At the 2020 census, the city's population was 155,929, making it the third most populous city in the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the fourth most populous city in New England after Boston, Worcester, and Providence. Metropolitan Springfield, as one of two metropolitan areas in Massachusetts (the other being Greater Boston), had a population of 699,162 in 2020.

Springfield was founded in 1636, the first Springfield in the New World. In the late 1700s, during the American Revolution, Springfield was designated by George Washington as the site of the Springfield Armory because of its central location. Subsequently it was the site of Shays' Rebellion. The city would also play a pivotal role in the Civil War, as a stop on the Underground Railroad and home of abolitionist John Brown, widely known for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and for the Armory's manufacture of the famed "Springfield rifles" used ubiquitously by Union troops. Closing during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, today the national park site features the largest collection of historic American firearms in the world.