Worcester, Massachusetts in the context of "New England"

Edward Durell Stone (March 9, 1902 – August 6, 1978) was an American architect known for the formal, highly decorative buildings he designed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works include the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City; the Parliament House of Pakistan in Islamabad; the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico; the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India; The Keller Center at the University of Chicago; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the EcoTarium, formerly known as the New England Science Center in Worcester, Massachusetts; and the campus of Windham College (which became Landmark College) in Putney, Vermont.

John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, many of which center around historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic, and piano music.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family and was exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre, and rock music. He attended Harvard University, studying with Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, and David Del Tredici, among others. His earliest work was aligned with modernist music, but he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed a minimalist aesthetic first fully realized in Phrygian Gates (1977) and later in the string septet Shaker Loops. Adams became increasingly active in San Francisco's contemporary music scene, and his orchestral works Harmonium (1980–1981) and Harmonielehre (1985) first gained him national attention. Other popular works from this time include the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) and the orchestral work El Dorado (1991).

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.

Greater Boston is the metropolitan region of New England encompassing the municipality of Boston, the capital of the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the most populous city in New England, and its surrounding areas, home to 4,941,632. The most stringent definition of the region, used by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, consists of most of the eastern third of mainland Massachusetts, excluding the Merrimack Valley and most of Southeastern Massachusetts, though most definitions (including the U.S. Census definition) include much of these areas and portions of southern New Hampshire.

While the city of Boston covers 48.4 square miles (125 km) and has 675,647 residents as of the 2020 census, the urbanization has extended well into surrounding areas and the Combined Statistical Area (CSA in the rest of the document), which includes the Providence, Rhode Island, Manchester, New Hampshire, Cape Cod and Worcester areas, has a population of more than 8.4 million people, making it one of the most populous such regions in the U.S.

Cambridge (/ˈkeɪmbrɪdʒ/ KAYM-brij) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the most populous city in the county, the fourth-largest in Massachusetts behind Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, and ninth-most populous in New England. The city was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, which was an important center of the Puritan theology that was embraced by the town's founders.

Founded in December 1630 during the colonial era, Cambridge was one among the first cities established in the Thirteen Colonies, and it went on to play a historic role during the American Revolution. In May 1775, approximately 16,000 American patriots assembled in Cambridge Common to begin organizing a military retaliation against British troops following the Battles of Lexington and Concord. On July 2, 1775, two weeks after the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia formally established the Continental Army and appointed George Washington commander of it, Washington arrived at Cambridge Common to take command of the Patriot soldiers camped there. Many of these soldiers played a role in supporting Washington's successful siege of Boston, which trapped garrisoned British troops from moving by land, forcing the British to ultimately abandon Boston. Cambridge Common is thus celebrated as the birthplace of the Continental Army.

Shays's Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades. The fighting took place in the areas around Springfield during 1786 and 1787. Historically, scholars have argued that the four thousand rebels, called Shaysites, who protested against economic and civil rights injustices by the Massachusetts government were led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. By the early 2020s, scholarship has suggested that Shays's role in the protests was significantly and strategically exaggerated by Massachusetts elites, who had a political interest in shifting blame for bad economic conditions away from themselves.

In 1787, the protesters marched on the federal Springfield Armory in an unsuccessful attempt to seize its weaponry and overthrow the government. The federal government, severely limited in its prerogatives under the Articles of Confederation, found itself unable to finance troops to put down the rebellion; it was consequently put down by the Massachusetts State Militia under William Shepard, alongside a privately funded local militia led by former Continental Army officer Benjamin Lincoln. The widely-held view had already developed that the Articles of Confederation were untenable and needed amending, with the events of the rebellion serving as further evidence for the later Constitutional Convention. There is continuing debate among scholars as to what extent the rebellion influenced the later drafting and ratification of the Constitution.

The Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in the Catholic Church have founded and managed a number of educational institutions, including the notable secondary schools, colleges, and universities listed here.

Some of these universities are in the United States where they are organized as the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. In Latin America, they are organized in the Association of Universities Entrusted to the Society of Jesus in Latin America.

The Providence and Worcester Railroad (P&W; reporting mark PW) is a Class II railroad operating 612 miles (985 km) of tracks in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, as well as New York via trackage rights. The company was founded in 1844 to build a railroad between Providence, Rhode Island, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and ran its first trains in 1847. A successful railroad, the P&W subsequently expanded with a branch to East Providence, Rhode Island, and for a time leased two small Massachusetts railroads. Originally a single track, its busy mainline was double-tracked after a fatal 1853 collision in Valley Falls, Rhode Island.

The P&W operated independently until 1888, when the New York, Providence and Boston Railroad (NYP&B) leased it; four years later, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad obtained the lease when it purchased the NYP&B. The P&W continued to exist as a company, as special rules protecting minority shareholders made it prohibitively expensive for the New Haven to purchase the company outright. The New Haven continued to lease the Providence and Worcester for 76 years, until the former was merged into Penn Central (PC) at the end of 1968. Penn Central demanded the shareholder rules keeping P&W alive be rewritten, and also threatened to abandon the company's tracks. In response, a group of P&W shareholders launched a fight with PC, asking the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to cancel the lease and let the P&W leave the New Haven's merger and go free. Against expectations, the ICC agreed, and after court battles, P&W prevailed and began operating independently again after 85 years. Upon regaining its independence, the railroad purchased railroad lines from the Boston and Maine Railroad and PC successor Conrail in the 1970s and 1980s. The company turned a profit operating lines bigger companies lost money on, and invested heavily in its infrastructure. P&W also absorbed a number of shortline railroads in Connecticut and Rhode Island.