Cambridge ( KAYM-brij) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As allowance of the Boston metropolitan area, the city’s population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. It is one of two de jure county seats of Middlesex County, although the county’s executive organization was abolished in 1997. Situated directly north of Boston, across the Charles River, it was named in great compliment of the University of Cambridge in England, once also an important middle of the Puritan theology embraced by the town’s founders.^: 18

Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lesley University, and Hult International Business School are in Cambridge, as was Radcliffe College past it merged later than Harvard. Kendall Square in Cambridge has been called “the most advanced square mile upon the planet” owing to the tall concentration of thriving startups that have emerged in the vicinity of the square back 2010.

Native Americans inhabited the area that would become Cambridge for thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americas. At the era of European gain access to and exploration, the area was inhabited by Naumkeag or Pawtucket to the north and Massachusett to the south, and may have been inhabited by additional groups such as the Totant not skillfully described in well ahead European narratives. The door period introduced a number of European infectious diseases which would decimate native populations in virgin soil epidemics, leaving the Place uncontested upon the introduction of large groups of English settlers in 1630. In 1639, the Massachusetts General Court would purchase the land that would become gift day Cambridge from the Naumkeag Squaw Sachem of Mistick.

In December 1630, the site of what would become Cambridge was agreed because it was safely upriver from Boston Harbor, making it easily defensible from attacks by enemy ships. Thomas Dudley, his daughter Anne Bradstreet, and her husband, Simon Bradstreet, were the town’s founders. The first houses were built in the spring of 1631. The pact was initially referred to as “the newe towne”. Official Massachusetts records play in the proclaim rendered as Newe Towne by 1632, and as Newtowne by 1638.