They also know more than they tell in their general-purpose spiels, so asking good and informed questions can add greatly to what one can learn. But our guide to Independence Hall had to have been a casualty of a contemporary graduate program who considered himself underemployed. His cynical tone and simplistic, reductionist analysis just did not fit in with the atmosphere and gravitas of these hallowed halls of liberty. As we traipsed behind the velvet ropes, admiring the colonial furniture and listening to his harangue, it was not the Founders but our own clueless times that seemed diminished. In parts of New England, visitors who throw a dead lobster in any direction are likely to hit some historical site.
Revolutionary War battlefields, important early sea ports, and colonial villages abound.
Today, dozens of palm readers, occult book stores, and practicing Wiccans make money off the tourists who visit Salem because of this sad historical chapter, and the city has even adopted as its logo a witch riding a broomstick. But there is much more to Salem, whose merchant ships carried on the trade that made the United States from its earliest days a paragon of free enterprise economics. Today, Salem has a fine maritime museum, with a reconstructed three-masted ship in its harbor. Salem was also the home of one of America's first great writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors can see not only his childhood home, but the Custom House where he worked at a cushy government job that left him plenty of time to write The Scarlet Letter.