A new plan of ye great town of Boston in New England in America

Here we see Boston when it was still a British administrative hub. Only a few North American cities were mapped on this scale and at this level of detail before the Revolution. The carefully labeled streets, wharves, and public buildings reveal a prosperous port city where different social classes lived near each other, with churches, meeting houses, and schools densely dotted throughout the urban core. Yet the very features that made Boston valuable to Britain—its deep harbor, network of wharves, and location in the New England region—would soon help transform it into a center of resistance. In these crowded neighborhoods, news of protests and riots spread quickly, allowing people of all ranks to see British presence and enforcement as a shared threat.