In 1907, a woman was arrested on a beach in Boston for wearing a one-piece swimsuit.
100 Mind-Blowing Boston Facts
The YMCA was founded in London in 1844 by George Williams, and its first U.S. outpost opened in Boston in 1851.
The Boston Marathon didn’t allow female runners until 1972.
According to Tori Avey, coffee became a popular drink in America after the Boston Tea Party of 1773: Making the switch from tea to coffee was considered a patriotic duty.
The bird on the Twitter logo is named “Larry.” He was named after the basketball player Larry Bird, who played for the Boston Celtics.
The Boston Marathon didn’t allow female runners until 1972. The first woman to finish the Boston Marathon, Roberta Gibb, actually ran the race a few years earlier in 1966. She hid in some bushes until the race started to avoid detection and then ran the marathon without any official sanction. Another woman, Katherine Switzer, didn’t declare herself a woman when she competed in 1967 and was allowed to enter the race. When it became apparent that she wasn’t a man, the officials unsuccessfully tried to stop her from competing. It wasn’t until the fall of 1971 when the Amateur Athletics Union allowed women to compete, which made 1972’s marathon the first to officially allow female entrants. Eight women competed in the 1972 Boston Marathon, and all eight completed it, with Nina Kuscsik claiming the first official female victory.
Oll Korrect. The origin of the phrase ‘OK’ dates back to a fad for intentionally misspelt abbreviations in 1830s Boston. When witty Bostonians began spelling ‘all correct’ as ‘Oll Korrect’, newspapers picked up on the joke. In 1840, US President Martin Van Buren, originally from Kinderhook in New York, adopted the phrase for his re-election campaign and his supporters set up ‘Old Kinderhook’, or ‘OK’, clubs across the country. The term quickly made the transition from slang to legitimate use.