Massachusetts, officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. Prior to 1685, there were two separate colonies within the boundaries of present-day Massachusetts. The area around Plymouth and Cape Cod, populated by pilgrims, was known as the Plymouth Colony or Old Colony. By the mid-1640s, its population was about 3,000 people.
The settlers who traveled to the New World on the Mayflower were a small group of separatists who had fled to Holland from England to practice their religion without official interference. Economic difficulties and the desire to establish an identity free from Dutch influence prompted them to seek the United States. Pilgrims were never granted a royal charter; their government relied on the Mayflower Pact, a document signed by 41 male passengers on the Mayflower five weeks before their arrival in the New World. The pact was not democratic, since it required the government of the elite, but it established an elective system and a basis for the limited consent of the governed as a source of authority.
The former colony was quickly overshadowed by its puritan northern neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630 by a group of Puritans from England under the leadership of Governor John Winthrop. A grant from King Charles I empowered the group to create a colony in Massachusetts. While the company intended to transfer the wealth of the New World to shareholders in England, the settlers themselves transferred the letter to Massachusetts.
In doing so, they turned a commercial enterprise into politics. Although the Winthrop Fleet landed in Salem, they didn't stay; the small settlement simply couldn't support hundreds of additional settlers. Before long, Winthrop and his group had moved, at the invitation of Winthrop University friend William Blackstone, to a new location on a nearby peninsula. In 1630, they changed the name of their settlement to Boston to that of the city they had left in England.
In the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans waged a war of extermination against the Pequots in 1637, and a war of attrition against the Narragansett. In 1643, the English handed over Narragansett sachem (leader) Miantonomo (1565-1564) to his enemies, the Mohegan tribe, where he was summarily killed. But based on the efforts of John Eliot (1604-1690), the missionaries of the colony worked to turn local indigenous peoples into Puritan Christians. In March 1644, the tribe of Massachusetts submitted to the colony and agreed to receive religious instruction.
A Massachusetts militia that had been created as a private army defeated the main Shaysite force on February 3, 1787.The Massachusett tribe in Ponkapoag, after which the state was named, were the area's first residents. The Massachusetts Constitution was ratified on March 2, 1780, while the Revolutionary War was underway, four years after the Articles of Confederacy were drafted and seven years before the current United States Constitution was ratified in 1787.The rest of the state west of Pioneer Valley is mainly Highlands, a chain of small mountains known as the Berkshires, which largely remained in Aboriginal hands until the 18th century, when Scottish-Irish settlers arrived and found the most productive land already settled, so they decided to work in mines and kilns. To combat this change, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs has charted a path toward decarbonizing the state's economy. Massachusetts has a flat-rate personal income tax of 5.3 percent, with an exemption for income below a threshold that varies from year to year.
Massachusetts also has large Dominican, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Cape Verdean and Brazilian populations. Members of the Wampanoag tribe once lived in more than 67 communities in southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. The settlers feared the reputedly hostile Native Americans of Massachusetts, but until 1675 relative peace prevailed thanks to a pact with Massasoit, head of the Wampanoag people. Other famous authors and poets born or strongly associated with Massachusetts include Anne Bradstreet, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edith Wharton, and.
After a harsh winter that claimed the lives of half of the English immigrants from the Mayflower in 1620, the Wampanoag tribe taught pilgrims to plant corn and survive in the wild. Massachusetts has been home to many creative types, including poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, and authors Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thanks in large part to the Ocean Spray cooperative, Massachusetts is the second largest blueberry-producing state in the union, after Wisconsin. In 1691, a new charter was issued that united the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Plymouth Colony and the Maine Colony as the Massachusetts Bay Province and placed it under a royal governor.
Massachusetts is located in the “prevailing westerly winds, the belt of air movement generally eastward, which surrounds the world at mid-latitudes. . .
