Massachusetts

The third most densely populated state in the country and the most urban state in New England, Massachusetts, the Bay State, is home to about 6.5 million people. In eastern Massachusetts, the greater Boston area alone, including the 400,000 residents of Rockingham and Strafford Counties across the border in New Hampshire, totals 4.5 million people. The western half of the state is more rural, except for the city of Springfield, once a significant factory town during the Industrial Revolution and now best known as the birthplace of basketball. Western Massachusetts is best known for its colleges, which include two of the Seven Sisters (Smith and Mount Holyoke), as well as Amherst, Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts. The eastern half of the state has more than its share of prestigious schools, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Wellesley.

One of the earliest American settlements, Massachusetts has a long history and was deeply involved in many of the country's major trends and movements, including the Great Awakening of the colonial era, the initial agitation for independence from England, the temperance and abolitionist movements, transcendentalism, progressivism, the Industrial Revolution, healthcare reform, and the culture wars of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Because of the city's lengthy history, many influential families originate from the Boston area, although they may have settled elsewhere. The oldest and most aristocratic, equivalent to the First Families of Virginia, are the Boston Brahmins, also called the First Families or “cold roast” Boston. Typically English Protestant in ancestry with roots to the 17th century, the Brahmins are a powerful “old boys network” in New England and the country at large. In a famous example, the Cabot family was founded by merchant John Cabot, who arrived in Boston in the early 18th century and began a shipping dynasty. Years later, the family was incorporated into the New England aristocracy and became one of the most prominent Brahmin clans. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., first coined the title “Boston Brahmin” in 1860, but the nature of these elitist networks is reflected in the Boston Toast, written by John Collins Bossidy (himself a graduate of Harvard):

The Brahmin families tend to exemplify the New England ideal of social liberalism, fiscal conservatism, classical education, and restraint in personal conduct and the expenditure of one's family wealth. It is considered gauche, for instance, for women to wear their ostentatious jewelry except on the rarest of occasions. Brahmin families typically maintain one or more family homes. A summer home, for instance, may consist of multiple houses and be used by multiple generations and branches of a family, the various descendants of its original builder. The Cabots and Lowells mentioned in the toast actually arrived later than most, neither having arrived on the Mayflower; they have since intermarried, as have most of the other families. The Brahmins are also known for their charitable foundations—“where there is a Cabot, there is a cause”—and for their distinctively prestigious accent, memorialized by Jim Backus as Harvard alumnus Thurston Howell III, on the television show Gilligan's Island.

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