The part of the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to northern Virginia is often called the Megalopolis, since it includes five major cities: Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. (students will be expected to be familiar with four of them, see below), and, even more importantly, consists of a virtually uninterrupted urbanized area within a distance of some 500 km. It may be regarded as a sort of extended capital of the US, with all the major urban activities intensely represented: cultural, economic and politico-governmental occupations are found there in profusion, as well as extremely high population density together with a very significant portion of the total population of the US. (See the Wikipedia article on the Megalopolis here.)
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Boston was among the early English colonies. Many of the colonists in New England, of which Boston is the only major city, went there in the early seventeenth century to find religious freedom: Boston is thus associated with one of the ideals of the "American dream", i.e., liberty. That association was reinforced by the fact that Boston was one of the centers of the movement for US independence in the late eighteenth century, and again in the 1830s, when the abolitionist movement was well-represented there.
Boston, and New England more generally, are associated with literature: many famous names of 19th and 20th century American literature are New Englanders. One example is Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick.
Today, Boston is home to many institutions of higher education: Harvard and MIT are just two examples.
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Largest city in US (> 8,000,000 inhabitants in 2000); enormous diversity of ethnic and racial backgrounds, of wealth, etc.; cultural capital (theater, plastic and visual arts, innumerable museums, fashion industry; Financial capital (Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange). I.e., Capital of US in every way except political. (Read the Wikipedia article on New York here.)
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Near center of Atlantic colonies in eighteenth century, so location of Continental Congress, which declared independence in 1776, & of early government institutions, including Constitutional Convention in 1787, that wrote Constitution.
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Political capital of the US, and seat of the federal government. Washington, D.C. has a municipal government like other cities, with a mayor, city council and so on, but is quite unusual among US cities in being under the direct authority of Congress. Indeed, the authors of the Constitution realized that if one of the states included the seat of government, that it would inevitably have advantages in relation to the other states; to avoid giving any state a fortuitous advantage, they decided to create a special district (the District of Columbia) to be the seat of government. Washington, D.C. is also unusual in having very little "ordinary" economic activity: the largest, indeed almost the exclusive major employer in the city is the federal government. The city was designed (by a French architect, L'Enfant) explicitly in order to underline the majesty and solemnity of the federal government, with broad avenues and monumental buildings.
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