1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, an English explorer, visited the Massachusetts region.
1620 The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.
1630 The Puritans founded Boston.
1636 Harvard became the first college in the colonies.
1641 Massachusetts adopted its first code of law, the Body of Liberties.
1675-1678 Massachusetts colonists won King Philip's War against the Indians.
1689-1763 Massachusetts colonists helped the British win the French and Indian Wars.
1691 Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colonies were combined into one colony.

1764 The colonists began to resist enforcement of British tax laws.
1770 British soldiers killed several colonists in the Boston Massacre.
1773 Patriots dumped British tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.
1775 American Revolutionary War began at Lexington and Concord.
1780 Massachusetts adopted its constitution.
1788 Massachusetts became the sixth state in the Union on February 6.

1807 The Embargo Act ruined Massachusetts shipping, and led to the rise of manufacturing.
1831 William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his antislavery newspaper The Liberator in Boston.

1912 A strike of textile workers at Lawrence led to improved conditions in the textile industry.
1919 Settlement of the Boston Police Strike brought national prominence to Governor Calvin Coolidge.

1959 The U.S. Navy launched its first nuclear-powered surface ship, the cruiser Long Beach, at Quincy.

French and Indian Wars
Revolutionary War

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This page was last updated on 10/16/2011.