BOSTON GLOBE, THE

daily newspaper published in Boston, the city's largest and one of the most influential newspapers in the United States. Founded in 1872, the Globe grew slowly at first, reaching a circulation of about 8,000 in 1877, when it was purchased by Charles H. Taylor. Under Taylor as publisher, the Globe began to publish an evening as well as a morning edition, to increase its coverage of New England and local news, and to feature big headlines, especially on sensational stories of crime and catastrophe. Taylor laced the local and regional news as heavily as possible with subscribers' names. The Boston Globe has long been ranked one of the top papers in the United States. In the 20th century the Globe, still under Taylor and then his sons, continued to stress local and regional news but devoted increasing attention to national and international news coverage while maintaining a generally liberal editorial stance. In 1993 the New York Times Company acquired the Globe for $1.1 billion. The modern Globe is recognized for its makeup, for its investigative reporting, and for its wide range of comment on subjects ranging from music to politics and medicine. History The colonial period Settlement and growth Boston was settled in 1630 by Puritan Englishmen of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who, for religious reasons, put the Atlantic Ocean between themselves and the Church of England. Ostensibly founded for commercial reasons, the Massachusetts Bay Company, under its governor, John Winthrop (15881649), brought its charterwhich it regarded as authorization to set up a self-governing settlement in the New England wildernessalong to the New World. The new town was named for Boston in Lincolnshire, the former home of many of the immigrants. Through necessity rather than choice, New Englanders turned to the sea for a livelihood and became shipbuilders, merchants, seamen, and fishermen because there was little else to do. The Shawmut Peninsula, upon which Boston was settled, was an ideal setting for a seaport. It was described in 1634 by William Wood in his New England Prospects as fittest for such as can Trade into England, for such commodities as the Country wants, being the chiefe place for shipping and Merchandize. With the triumph of the Puritan Party in England in 1648, people moved freely between New England and the homeland, and close ties of family and trade linked Boston and London. By the end of the 17th century, Boston's fleet of seagoing vessels was exceeded only by those of London and Bristol in the English-speaking world. Boston held its place as the largest town in British North America until the middle of the 18th century, when it fell behind the faster growing ports of Philadelphia and New York City. Political life and revolutionary activity During its first 50 years Boston was a homogeneous, self-governing Puritan community in which the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company ruled as they saw fit. The three Puritan churches, established on the congregational principle, accounted for almost all the organized religion in Boston. Religious dissidents were banished, and some Quakers who persisted in returning were hanged for their pains. Although the increasing prosperity of the colonial merchants made London quite aware of Massachusetts Bay, steps to assert royal authority there were taken only near the end of Charles II's reign, in the 1680s. The company's charter was declared null and void in 1684. In 1686, with the arrival of Sir Edmund Andros as the first royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the authority of the crown was established in Boston itself. With this change, the Church of England first came to the town, and the Puritan isolation was over. Although the Congregational clergy, particularly the voluble fatherson combination of Increase (16391723) and Cotton (16631728) Mather, still made themselves heard, the lines of authority had altered. Boston never proved wholly docile. When word of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 reached them, the citizens on April 18, 1689, dumped Andros out of office and imprisoned him. The memory of the autonomous first half-century lingered. As London endeavoured to enforce navigation laws and gain revenue from the Boston trade at the expense of the colonies, the aggrieved inhabitants indulged in what they felt to be justified resistance against unlawful authority. After passage of the Stamp Act by Parliament in 1765, disaffection grew, and the governor's house was stormed and gutted, an act that destroyed many irreplaceable records of the colony's history. The Boston Massacre of 1770, in which British troops fired on a crowd of civilian hecklers and killed several persons, and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which colonists disguised as Indians dumped three shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor, were key incidents in measuring popular sentiment prior to the Revolution. With the confrontations and exchange of shots at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the die was cast. When George Washington's army besieged the British in Boston during the following winter, normal life in the town was suspended. On March 17, 1776, impelled by Washington's artillery positioned on Dorchester Heights, British troops and officials left. They were accompanied by loyal supporters of the crown, including a number of the principal merchants. A constitution was framed in 1780, and John Hancock was elected the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.