Cambridge,city,Middlesex county, easternMassachusetts, U.S., situated on the north bank of theCharles River, partly oppositeBoston. Originally settled asNew Towne in 1630 by theMassachusetts Bay Company, it was organized as a town in 1636 when it became the site of Harvard College (now an undergraduate school ofHarvard University). The town was renamed for Cambridge,England, in 1638 and became a county seat in 1643. The old part of Cambridge (around Harvard Square) is regarded as a symbol of Americanculture and history. It was there that the general synods of theNew England churches met in 1637 and 1647 to settle disputed points of doctrine and from there that the clergymanThomas Hooker’s congregation departed forConnecticut in 1636. At the outbreak of theAmerican Revolution, the first revolutionary army camped at what is now Cambridge Common, whereGeorge Washington assumed leadership of the Continental forces on July 3, 1775. The first MassachusettsConstitutional Convention met in Cambridge in 1779–80.

Early industrial development was slow.Stephen Day (Daye) set up the firstprinting press in the British colonies at Cambridge in 1638 (forerunner of the city’s modern publishing and printing industry), and the first books to be printed inAmerica came from this press. After completion (1912) of subway connections to Boston, the city experienced rapid industrial expansion. Most manufacturing industries had declined in importance by the late 20th century, but they were replaced by firms developing computer software, electronics, and biotechnology. Photographic equipment and other light manufactures are produced, but services predominate. Institutes ofhigher education are the largest employers.

Scientific and industrial research is stimulated by the presence of Harvard University and theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (founded in Boston in 1861 and moved to Cambridge in 1916). Cambridge is also the seat of Radcliffe College (1879; nowintegrated with Harvard),Lesley University (1909), and the Episcopal Divinity School (1867). The headquarters of theSmithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, formerly inWashington, D.C., was moved to Cambridge in 1955; it is now part of theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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Cambridge has been home to many notable people, and its Mount Auburn Cemetery contains the graves of the poetHenry Wadsworth Longfellow; the poet-diplomatJames Russell Lowell; the physician-authorOliver Wendell Holmes;Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; and the actorEdwin Booth. The Longfellow House (built 1759) served asWashington’s headquarters (1775–76), was Longfellow’s home (1837–82), and has been designatedLongfellow National Historic Site.

The city’s population reached a peak of 120,740 in 1950 but then entered a period of decline; this wasattributed to the movement of people and industry to farther suburbs. Partly owing to the growth of high-technology companies, the population stabilized in the 1980s and early ’90s. One-fourth of city residents are college students. Inc. city, 1846. Pop. (2010) 105,162; Cambridge-Newton-Framingham Metro Division, 1,503,085; Boston-Cambridge-Quincy Metro Area, 4,552,402; (2020) 118,403; Cambridge-Newton-Framingham Metro Division, 2,441,831; Boston-Cambridge-Newton Metro Area, 4,941,632.