Cities make history in a lot of different ways. Florence, Italy, was the city-state made influential by the Medici's and their gifts to the arts. Washington and London are famous for their politics. New York and London are famous for their financial acumen. St. Petersburg, Russia is famous for the monuments left by Peter the Great. Jerusalem is famous (or infamous) as the center of three great religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Now comes the delightful suburban Boston community of Newton. A professional ghetto filled with psychiatrists, other physicians, Harvard, MIT and BU professors, is, as the Times puts it, a "brainy and self-assured city of 83,000.
Newton, Massachusetts is the first city to elect a black president, a black governor and a black mayor. The population is less than 3% black. People were willing to look beyond race in making their decision, and that's a tribute to Newton and its progressive nature. Ummmm, yeah. The mayor's wife is a project manager in the child development program at Harvard.