History of BostonHistory & audio guide · Boston

In Boston you don't go looking for history: it's painted on the ground, and you walk on it. This special travels the full arc, from before the city to today. It began on a narrow peninsula, the Shawmut, home to Algonquian peoples, where in 1630 John Winthrop's Puritans founded something they believed exemplary: a city upon a hill. On that religious and commercial base grew an Atlantic port, rich and politicized, with Harvard already in 1636 and taverns where the Empire was argued over.

From those arguments came the spark: resistance to British taxes, the Sons of Liberty, the Boston Tea Party, the first battles of independence. Then the city remade itself again: it filled in the sea to grow, received the enormous Irish immigration and became industrial, immigrant and intellectual, until it turned into a capital of knowledge.

The strange part is that almost all of it still stands: 17th-century burying grounds, colonial churches and a red line on the pavement connecting the places where the rebellion began. Six chapters to understand why so many layers of history share a single walk. Walk it while Ruthy tells you the story, standing right there, in no hurry.