| The first English immigrant to settle in Boston was the Reverend William Blackstone. He came by himself in 1629, to a peninsula by a stream, called by the local Algonquin inhabitants, Shawmet. A year later, John Winthrop and his Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arrived to the north in Salem. Finding Salem less than desirable for a settlement, Blackstone invited Winthrop to visit Shawmut.
On September 17, 1630, Winthrop decided to make Shawmut a permanent settlement and renamed it Boston, after his hometown in Lincolnshire England. Winthrop and his followers left England to escape religious persecution and to establish a pious Puritan state. Ironically, Blackstone shortly left the colony due the harsh, intolerant society that the Puritans had created. |
The Curse of the Bambino (1920 - 2004) was an urban myth or scapegoat cited as a reason for the failure of the Boston Red Sox baseball team to win the World Series for 86 years after they sold Babe Ruth, sometimes called The Bambino, to the New York Yankees. The flip side of the curse was New York's success—after the sale, the once-lackluster Yankees became one of the most successful franchises in North American professional sports. While some fans took the superstition of the Curse seriously, many others used the expression in a tongue-in-cheek manner. The curse ended in 2004 when the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals 4-0 to win the 2004 World Series. |
