Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell is a city in the U. S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Located in Middlesex County, Lowell was a county seat until Massachusetts disbanded county government in 1999. With an estimated population of 109,945 in 2014, it is the fourth-largest city in Massachusetts, the second-largest in the Boston metropolitan statistical area; the city is part of a smaller Massachusetts statistical area called Greater Lowell, as well as New England's Merrimack Valley region. Incorporated in 1826 to serve as a mill town, Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, a local figure in the Industrial Revolution; the city became known as the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, due to a large series of textile mills and factories. Many of the Lowell's historic manufacturing sites were preserved by the National Park Service to create Lowell National Historical Park. During the Cambodian genocide, the city took in an influx of refugees, leading to a Cambodia Town and America's second-largest Cambodian-American population.
Lowell is home to two institutions of higher education. Founded in the 1820s as a planned manufacturing center for textiles, Lowell is located along the rapids of the Merrimack River, 25 miles northwest of Boston in what was once the farming community of East Chelmsford, Massachusetts; the so-called Boston Associates, including Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson of the Boston Manufacturing Company, named the new mill town after their visionary leader, Francis Cabot Lowell, who had died five years before its 1823 incorporation. As Lowell's population grew, it acquired land from neighboring towns, diversified into a full-fledged urban center. Many of the men who composed the labor force for constructing the canals and factories had immigrated from Ireland, escaping the poverty and Potato Famines of the 1830s and 1840s; the mill workers, young single women called Mill Girls came from the farm families of New England. By the 1850s, Lowell had the largest industrial complex in the United States.
The textile industry wove cotton produced in the South. In 1860, there were more cotton spindles in Lowell than in all eleven states combined that would form the Confederacy, yet the city did not finish raw materials produced in the American South, but rather became involved in the South in another way, too. Many of the coarse cottons produced in Lowell returned to the South to clothe enslaved people, according to historian Sven Beckert, "'Lowell' became the generic term slaves used to describe coarse cottons." The city continued to thrive as a major industrial center during the 19th century, attracting more migrant workers and immigrants to its mills. Next were the Catholic Germans, followed by a large influx of French Canadians during the 1870s and 1880s. Waves of immigrants included Portuguese, Lithuanians, Swedes and eastern European Jews, they came to work in Lowell and settled in ethnic neighborhoods, with the city's population reaching 50% foreign-born by 1900. By the time World War I broke out in Europe, the city had reached its economic and population peak of over 110,000 people.
The Mill Cities' manufacturing base declined as companies began to relocate to the South in the 1920s. The city fell into hard times, was referred to as a "depressed industrial desert" by Harper's Magazine in 1931, as the Great Depression worsened. At this time, more than one-third of its population was "on relief", as only three of its major textile corporations remained active. Several years the mills were reactivated, making parachutes and other military necessities for the World War II effort. However, this economic boost was short-lived and the post-war years saw the last textile plants close. In the 1970s, Lowell became part of the Massachusetts Miracle, being the headquarters of Wang Laboratories. At the same time, Lowell became home to thousands of new immigrants, many from Cambodia, following the genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge; the city continued focusing more on culture. The former mill district along the river was restored and became part of the Lowell National Historical Park, founded in the late 1970s.
Although Wang went bankrupt in 1992, the city continued its cultural focus by hosting the nation's largest free folk festival, the Lowell Folk Festival, as well as many other cultural events. This effort began to attract other families back to the urban center. Additional historic manufacturing and commercial buildings were adapted as residential units and office space. By the 1990s, Lowell had built a new ballpark and arena, which became home to two minor league sports teams, the Lowell Devils and Lowell Spinners; the city began to have a larger student population. The University of Massachusetts Lowell and Middlesex Community College expanded their programs and enrollment. During the period of time when Lowell was part of the Massachusetts Miracle, the Lowell City Development Authority created a Comprehensive Master Plan which included recommendations for zoning adaptations within the city; the city's original zoning code was adopted in 1926 and was revised in 1966 and 2004, with changes included to respond to concerns about overdevelopment.
In 2002, in lieu of updating the Comprehensive Master Plan, more broad changes were recommended so that the land use and development would be consistent with the current master plan. The most significant revision to the 1966 zoning code is the adoption of an inclusion of a transect-based zoning code and some aspects of a form-based code style of zoning that emphasizes urban design elements as a means to ensure that infill development will respect the character of the neighborhood or district in question. By 2004, the recommended zoning changes were unanim
Roxbury Latin School
The Roxbury Latin School, founded in Roxbury, Massachusetts, by the Rev. John Eliot under a charter received from King Charles I of England, is the oldest school in continuous existence in North America. Since its founding in 1645, it has educated boys on a continuous basis. Located since 1927 at 101 St. Theresa Avenue in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the school now serves 300 boys in grades seven through twelve. Eliot founded the school "to fit for public service both in church and in commonwealth in succeeding ages," and the school still considers instilling a desire to perform public service among its principal missions; the school's endowment is estimated at $189 million, the largest of any boys' day school in the United States. The school maintains a need-blind admissions policy, admitting boys without consideration of the ability of their families to pay the full tuition, its previous headmaster, F. Washington Jarvis, who retired in the summer of 2004 after a 30-year tenure, published two books about Roxbury Latin: a history of the school and a collection of his speeches to boys at Roxbury Latin.
The title of the former, Schola Illustris, was the phrase Cotton Mather used to describe the school in 1690, following John Eliot's death. In addition to those books, Richard Walden Hale published Tercentenary History of the Roxbury Latin School in 1946. Roxbury Latin is a member of the Independent School League and NEPSAC, it has an unofficial sister school relationship with the Winsor School in Boston as well as an African brother school, the Maru a Pula School. According to the school's website, the median Roxbury Latin student of the class of 2015 scored 2210 on the SAT. Roxbury Latin has the highest median SAT average of any private school. A 2004 piece in The Wall Street Journal noted Roxbury Latin for its acceptance rates at the most competitive universities, despite maintaining a low tuition relative to its peers. In 2003, Worth magazine ranked Roxbury Latin as the #1 "feeder school" for elite universities, with a larger portion of its graduating class attending Princeton University, Harvard University, or Yale University than any other school.
In 2008, the website PrepReview.com updated the earlier survey by Worth magazine. Despite using more inclusive criteria in place of Worth's narrow focus on Princeton and Yale, Roxbury Latin once again topped the rankings. PrepReview.com looked at the number of matriculants to all eight Ivy League undergraduate colleges as well as to MIT and Stanford University. Roxbury Latin placed nearly half of its recent graduates among these institutions, the highest rate of any secondary school in the world; the 2008 rankings by PrepReview.com placed Roxbury Latin first in all of the following categories: America's Top 50 High Schools, America's Best High Schools Ranked by SAT, America's Best Private Day Schools. Additionally, PrepReview.com ranked Roxbury Latin first in the world among secondary schools for its students' success at gaining admission to Harvard University: in 2009, 20% of the graduating class at Roxbury Latin matriculated at Harvard. In 2010, Forbes magazine ranked Roxbury Latin fifth in a list of the top 10 prep schools in America..
In 2015, TheStreet ranked Roxbury Latin among Top US Private Schools with the Most Graduates Getting Into Ivy League Universities.. The school provides school bus service for some students who live in the Dorchester, South Boston, Hyde Park and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston; the school charges a nominal fee for the bus usage. The school has varsity, junior varsity and lower-level teams in football, cross country, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, tennis and track and field; the school has a notable wrestling program, with the former varsity coach Steven E. Ward being inducted into the wrestling hall of fame in 2009; the varsity soccer team was co-champions with Rivers in the NEPSAC tournament in 2012. The Track & Field team has won the NEPSTA Championship in nine of the last eleven years, including five in a row from 2011–2015; the Track Team won the ISTA Championship in 2012 and 2013. The Tennis team has won the ISL Championship in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, has been invited to the NEPSAC Class B Tennis Championship nine years in a row, winning the tournament in 2013 and finishing as runners-up in 2015.
The school has a wide variety of extracurricular activities for its students to partake in. The Model United Nations program and the Debate and Public Speaking program are popular, with a hundred students in each; the school participates in many Model United Nations conferences and debate tournaments every year. Another moderately popular activity is an annual interscholastic robotics competition; the school team has done exceptionally well in recent years, placing 5th in the New England Division in 2009. In 2010, it placed 2nd out of a school record; the school boasts several language clubs and a chess team that has won or shared the South Shore Interscholastic Chess League title in 2 of the last 5 years, as well as community service clubs, such as Habitat for Humanity. The school has an extensive music program, available to students of all grades. There is junior chorus for seventh and eighth graders, a glee club for high schoolers. There is a small a cappella group consisting of about fourteen singers called the Latonics that requires an audition.
Additionally, there is a jazz band and several halls a year devoted to instrumental performances by students and faculty. James Pierpont, principal founder of Yale University Paul Dudley (
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, with about 6,700 undergraduate students and about 15,250 postgraduate students. Established in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning, its history and wealth have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities; the Harvard Corporation is its first chartered corporation. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early College trained Congregational and Unitarian clergy, its curriculum and student body were secularized during the 18th century, by the 19th century, Harvard had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's long tenure transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university. A. Lawrence Lowell, who followed Eliot, further reformed the undergraduate curriculum and undertook aggressive expansion of Harvard's land holdings and physical plant.
James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College; the university is organized into eleven separate academic units—ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area: its 209-acre main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge 3 miles northwest of Boston. Harvard's endowment is worth $39.2 billion, making it the largest of any academic institution. Harvard is a large residential research university; the nominal cost of attendance is high, but the university's large endowment allows it to offer generous financial aid packages. The Harvard Library is the world's largest academic and private library system, comprising 79 individual libraries holding over 18 million items; the University is cited as one of the world's top tertiary institutions by various organizations.
Harvard's alumni include eight U. S. presidents, more than thirty foreign heads of state, 62 living billionaires, 359 Rhodes Scholars, 242 Marshall Scholars. As of October 2018, 158 Nobel laureates, 18 Fields Medalists, 14 Turing Award winners have been affiliated as students, faculty, or researchers. In addition, Harvard students and alumni have won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes and 108 Olympic medals, have founded a large number of companies worldwide. Harvard was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, it acquired British North America's first known printing press. In 1639, it was named Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge, who had left the school £779 and his scholar's library of some 400 volumes; the charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650. A 1643 publication gave the school's purpose as "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust".
It offered a classic curriculum on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. It was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches; the leading Boston divine Increase Mather served as president from 1685 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president, not a clergyman, marking a turning of the college from Puritanism and toward intellectual independence. Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties; when the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard Joseph Willard died a year in 1804, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency of Harvard two years which signaled the changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas.
In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on the campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' "participation in the Divine Nature" and the possibility of understanding "intellectual existences". Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that a person can grasp the "divine plan" in all phenomena; when it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time; the popularity of Agassiz's efforts to "soar with Plato" also derived from other writings to which Harvard students
New England
New England is a region composed of six states of the northeastern United States: Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north, respectively; the Atlantic Ocean is to the east and southeast, Long Island Sound is to the south. Boston is New England's largest city as well as the capital of Massachusetts; the largest metropolitan area is Greater Boston with nearly a third of the entire region's population, which includes Worcester, Manchester, New Hampshire, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1620, Puritan Separatist Pilgrims from England established Plymouth Colony, the second successful English settlement in America, following the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia founded in 1607. Ten years more Puritans established Massachusetts Bay Colony north of Plymouth Colony. Over the next 126 years, people in the region fought in four French and Indian Wars, until the English colonists and their Iroquois allies defeated the French and their Algonquian allies in America.
In 1692, the town of Salem and surrounding areas experienced the Salem witch trials, one of the most infamous cases of mass hysteria in history. In the late 18th century, political leaders from the New England colonies initiated resistance to Britain's taxes without the consent of the colonists. Residents of Rhode Island captured and burned a British ship, enforcing unpopular trade restrictions, residents of Boston threw British tea into the harbor. Britain responded with a series of punitive laws stripping Massachusetts of self-government which were termed the "Intolerable Acts" by the colonists; these confrontations led to the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775 and the expulsion of the British authorities from the region in spring 1776. The region played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, was the first region of the U. S. transformed by the Industrial Revolution, centered on the Merrimack river valleys. The physical geography of New England is diverse for such a small area.
Southeastern New England is covered by a narrow coastal plain, while the western and northern regions are dominated by the rolling hills and worn-down peaks of the northern end of the Appalachian Mountains. The Atlantic fall line lies close to the coast, which enabled numerous cities to take advantage of water power along the many rivers, such as the Connecticut River, which bisects the region from north to south; each state is subdivided into small incorporated municipalities known as towns, many of which are governed by town meetings. The only unincorporated areas exist in the sparsely populated northern regions of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont. New England is one of the Census Bureau's nine regional divisions and the only multi-state region with clear, consistent boundaries, it maintains a strong sense of cultural identity, although the terms of this identity are contrasted, combining Puritanism with liberalism, agrarian life with industry, isolation with immigration. The earliest known inhabitants of New England were American Indians who spoke a variety of the Eastern Algonquian languages.
Prominent tribes included the Abenakis, Mi'kmaq, Pequots, Narragansetts and Wampanoag. Prior to the arrival of European settlers, the Western Abenakis inhabited New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, as well as parts of Quebec and western Maine, their principal town was Norridgewock in Maine. The Penobscot lived along the Penobscot River in Maine; the Narragansetts and smaller tribes under their sovereignty lived in Rhode Island, west of Narragansett Bay, including Block Island. The Wampanoag occupied southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket; the Pocumtucks lived in Western Massachusetts, the Mohegan and Pequot tribes lived in the Connecticut region. The Connecticut River Valley linked numerous tribes culturally and politically; as early as 1600, French and English traders began exploring the New World, trading metal and cloth for local beaver pelts. On April 10, 1606, King James I of England issued a charter for the Virginia Company, which comprised the London Company and the Plymouth Company.
These two funded ventures were intended to claim land for England, to conduct trade, to return a profit. In 1620, the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and established Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, beginning the history of permanent European settlement in New England. In 1616, English explorer John Smith named the region "New England"; the name was sanctioned on November 3, 1620 when the charter of the Virginia Company of Plymouth was replaced by a royal charter for the Plymouth Council for New England, a joint-stock company established to colonize and govern the region. The Pilgrims wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact before leaving the ship, it became their first governing document; the Massachusetts Bay Colony came to dominate the area and was established by royal charter in 1629 with its major town and port of Boston established in 1630. Massachusetts Puritans began to settle in Connecticut as early as 1633. Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts for heresy, led a group south, founded Providence Plantation in the area that became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1636.
At this time, Vermont was yet unsettled, the territories of New Hampshire and Maine were claimed and governed by Massachusetts. Relationships between colonists and local Indian tribes alter
Boston Manufacturing Company
The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated the first factory in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership a group of investors known as The Boston Associates, for the manufacture of cotton textiles, it built the first integrated spinning and weaving factory in the world at Waltham, using water power. They used plans for a power loom that he smuggled out of England as well as trade secrets from the earlier horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory, of Beverly, Massachusetts, of 1788; this was the largest factory in the U. S. with a workforce of about 300. It was a efficient profitable mill that, with the aid of the Tariff of 1816, competed with British textiles at a time when many smaller operations were being forced out of business. While the Rhode Island System that followed was famously employed by Samuel Slater, the Boston Associates improved upon it with the "Waltham System"; the idea was copied at Lowell and elsewhere in New England.
Many rural towns now had their own textile mills. Since 1793, when Samuel Slater established the first water-powered successful textile spinning mill in America at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, water power had been operating machinery to process cotton fiber into yarn, which would be outsourced to small weaving shops and private homes where it would be woven into cloth on hand-operated looms. By 1810, dozens of spinning mills dotted the New England countryside. However, cloth production was still slow with this system. While on a visit to Lancashire, England in 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell studied the workings of the successful British textile industry, he paid particular attention to the power loom, a device for which there was yet no equal in America. He knew. Upon his return trip to Boston in 1812, he committed the plans to memory, disguising himself as a country farmer, since the British banned export of the new technology at the time. In September 1813 The Boston Associates purchased the Boies Paper Mill site in Waltham.
With a ten-foot drop in the nearby Charles River, it was an ideal location to establish the new factory they envisioned. The group hired a skilled mechanic named Paul Moody of Amesbury to develop and construct the machinery and to supervise the construction of the new mill. After over a year of trials, Moody was able to bring Lowell's description of the power loom to fruition, making his own advancements along the way, it would be the perfection of Moody's power loom that would be the real "revolution" in American industry. For the first time, all phases of cloth production could be brought under one roof. Moody developed a system of power transmission using a series of leather belts and pulleys powered by water turbines, that would prove much more efficient than the shaft and gear system in use; the first mill was completed in late 1814, after a year of construction. Jacob Perkins was in charge of installing the first waterwheel, dam and raceway. By early 1815, the cloth was sold. Production expanded as did profits.
In 1816 a second larger mill was built next to the first mill. In addition to producing cloth, it produced textile machinery for other companies; the two mills were connected in 1843, as part of a planned expansion. The power loom was soon copied by many other New England area mills, modified and perfected along the way. Francis Cabot Lowell died in 1817, at age 42; the Boston Associates attempted to create a well-controlled system of labor which varied from the harsh conditions observed while in Lancashire. The mill owners recruited young Yankee farm girls from the surrounding area to come work the machines at Waltham; the mill girls, as they came to be known, lived in boarding houses provided by the company and were supervised by older women, were subject to strict codes of conduct. They worked eighty hours per week; the workers would wake to the factory bell at 4:40 in the morning. They would report to have a half-hour breakfast break at 7:00 a.m.. They would work until the half-hour- to forty-five-minute lunch break at noon.
At 7:00 p.m. the factory would shut down and the workers would return to their company houses. This routine was followed six days a week; this system became known as the Waltham System. By the early 1820s the water power of the Charles River at Waltham was just about maximized, the investors sought a new location to build more mills; as the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, in 1822 they copied the Waltham System at the new city of Lowell, Massachusetts on a much larger scale. The same group of investors would establish Lawrence, Manchester, New Hampshire and several other new industrial centers throughout New England during the first half of the 19th century; the factory methods introduced at Waltham would be copied by other industries in the years to follow. The Waltham site would be expanded again during the late 19th century; the original mills were connected, the gable roofs removed, additional floors were added with flat roofs. The Boston Manufacturing Company closed in 1930, it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1977.
Some of the company's worker housing has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, the site is occupied by the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development-subsidized housing for seniors, the Ira B. Gordon Center For the Arts, other housing. Lowell Mill Girls Lowell Mills List of National Historic Landmarks in Massachusetts National Register of Historic Places listings in
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Charles River
The Charles River is an 80-mile-long long river in eastern Massachusetts. From its source in Hopkinton the river flows in a northeasterly direction, traveling through 23 cities and towns before reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Boston; the Native-American name for the Charles River was Quinobequin, meaning "meandering". The Charles River is fed by 80 streams and several major aquifers as it flows 80 miles, starting at Teresa Road just north of Echo Lake in Hopkinton, passing through 23 cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts before emptying into Boston Harbor. Thirty-three lakes and ponds and 35 municipalities are or part of the Charles River drainage basin. Despite the river's length and large drainage area, its source is only 26 miles from its mouth, the river drops only 350 feet from source to sea; the Charles River watershed contains more than 8,000 acres of protected wetlands, referred to as Natural Valley Storage. These areas are important in preventing downstream flooding and providing natural habitats to native species.
Harvard University, Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are located along the Charles River. Near its mouth, it forms the border between Cambridge and Charlestown; the river is lined by the parks of the Charles River Reservation. On the Charles River Esplanade stands the Hatch Shell, where concerts are given in summer evenings; the basin is known for its Independence Day celebration. The middle section of the river between the Watertown Dam and Wellesley is protected by the properties of the Upper Charles River Reservation and other state parks, including the Hemlock Gorge Reservation, Cutler Park, the Elm Bank Reservation. A detailed depth chart of the lower basin of the Charles River, from near the Watertown Dam to the New Charles River Dam, has been created by a partnership between the MIT Sea Grant College Program and the Charles River Alliance of Boaters. Online and hardcopy charts are available as a public service; the river is well known for its rowing, canoeing, paddleboarding and sailing, both recreational and competitive.
The river may be kayaked. The "Lower Basin" between the Longfellow and Harvard bridges is home to Community Boating, the Harvard University Sailing Center, the MIT Sailing Pavilion; the Head of the Charles Regatta is held here every October. In early June, the annual Hong Kong Boston Dragon boat Festival is held in Cambridge, near the Weeks Footbridge; the Charles River Bike Path runs 23 miles along the banks of the Charles, starting at the Museum of Science and passing the campuses of MIT, Harvard and Boston University. The path is popular with bikers. Many runners gauge their distance and speed by keeping track of the mileage between the bridges along the route. For several years, the Charles River Speedway operated along part of the river. On July 13, 2013, swimming for the general public was permitted for the first time in more than 50 years. Long before European settlers named and shaped the Charles, Native Americans living in New England made the river a central part of their lives; the native name for the Charles River was Quinobequin, meaning "meandering".
Captain John Smith explored and mapped the coast of New England, naming many features naming the Charles River the Massachusetts River, derived from the tribe living in the region. When Smith presented his map to King Charles I he suggested that the king should feel free to change any of the "barbarous names" for "English" ones; the King made many such changes, but only four survive today, one of, the Charles River which Charles named for himself. In portions of its length, the Charles drops in elevation and has little current. Despite this, early settlers in Dedham, found a way to use the Charles to power mills. In 1639, the town dug a canal from the Charles to a nearby brook. By this action, a portion of the Charles's flow was diverted, providing enough current for several mills; the new canal and the brook together are now called Mother Brook. The canal is regarded as the first industrial canal in North America, it remains in use for flood control. Waltham was the site of the first integrated textile factory in America, built by Francis Cabot Lowell in 1814, by the 19th century the Charles River was one of the most industrialized areas in the United States.
Its hydropower soon fueled many factories. By the century's end, 20 dams had been built across the river to generate power for industry. An 1875 government report listed 43 mills along the 9 1⁄2-mile tidal estuary from Watertown Dam to Boston Harbor. From 1816 to 1968, the U. S. Army operated a gun and ammunition storage and production facility known as the Watertown Arsenal. While it was key to many of the nation's war efforts over its several decades in operation, not the least of which being the American Civil War and World War I, its location in Watertown so near the Charles did great environmental harm; the arsenal was declared a Super Fund site, after its closure by the government it had to be cleaned at significant expense before it could be safely used again for other purposes. The many factories and mills along the banks of the Charles supported a buoyant economy in their time but
