Massachusetts historical timeline

Origins

The Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples lived here long before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620 — an arrival made survivable by an epidemic that had already emptied the surrounding villages.

Turning points

The Salem witch trials of 1692 killed twenty people on spectral evidence and ended when the colony's own leadership lost confidence in the proceedings. Eighty years later the Revolution began here, on the road back from Lexington to Boston in April 1775.

Influential people

Nineteenth-century wealth came from the sea and then from water power: the whaling fleets of New Bedford and Nantucket, and the textile mills at Lowell and Lawrence that made this the first industrial region in the United States.

Cultural evolution

Waves of Irish, Italian and Portuguese immigration reshaped Boston and the mill cities from the 1840s, and the city's politics with them.

Present-day significance

The mills are gone and the universities, hospitals and biotechnology that replaced them now define the state's economy — a concentration of research institutions unusual anywhere in the world.