Boston: City in Massachusetts. By some authorities the name is said to have been given in honor of John Cotton, vicar of St. Bodolph's church in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, and one of the first clergymen in the American Boston. Others say it was named before the arrival of John Cotton, for three prominent colonists from Boston, England. The tracing for the word Boston elicits that in the Seventh Century a pious monk known as St. Botolph or bot-hopl (boat-help) founded a church in what is now Lincolnshire, in En

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