Boston is in the United States.
Boston . The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston , a Metropolitan Statistical Area ( MSA ) home to a census-estimated 4.7 million people in 2014 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country . One of the oldest cities in the United States , Boston was founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from England . Greater Boston is the metropolitan region of New England encompassing the municipality of Boston , the capital of the US state of Massachusetts , and the most populous city in New England , as well as its surrounding areas . Suffolk County is a county in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts , in the United States . United States . The capital is Washington , D.C. , and the largest city is New York City ; nine other major metropolitan areas -- each with at least 4.5 million inhabitants and the largest having more than 13 million people -- are Los Angeles , Chicago , Dallas , Houston , Philadelphia , Miami , Atlanta , Boston , and San Francisco .