Boston was an educational forerunner, both as part of a British colony and as a U.S. city. In the British colonies, the city established the first free public school in 1635 and the first public library in 1653. As part of the United States, it founded the first high school for girls in 1825 and the first kindergarten in 1860. Boston has continued to be a leader in education with more than 65 colleges and universities in the metropolitan area. Well-known institutions include Northeastern University, Boston University, the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and the New England Conservatory of Music, all located in Boston; Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; Brandeis University in Waltham; Tufts University in Medford; and Wellesley College in Wellesley.
Boston's cultural heritage also includes American literature. The Atlantic Monthly, the oldest general magazine published in the United States, was the voice of liberal Boston when it was launched from the Old Corner Bookstore in 1857 under the editorship of writer James Russell Lowell. Under the direction of writer and publisher James Fields, who edited the Atlantic Monthly and was the publisher of many of the foremost American writers of the time, the bookstore became a gathering place of 19th-century writers. These writers included essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, social reformer Julia Ward Howe, and novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Boston Information info
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