Boston Walking Tours 2009

Last year I posted a list of walking tours in the Boston area in hopes of encouraging people to get out and explore the history, architecture, culture, topography, and nature of the area.  I’ve updated the list and links for 2009, once again giving primacy of place to the two organizations in which I volunteer to lead tours.

Boston By Foot – Boston’s premier walking tour organization is well worth becoming a member to take advantage of free tours, discounted special tours, and members-only events.  Check out the Boston By Foot Meetup Group as well for unique tour announcements.  I’ve highlighted the tours that I guide in bold below, although many other wonderful guides also lead these tours.

Seven classic tours take you around historic Boston:

• Beacon Hill
• Boston By Little Feet
• Boston Underfoot
• Heart of the Freedom Trail
• Literary Landmarks
• North End
• Victorian Back Bay

Make sure to check out special Boston Harborfest tours offered June 30-July 5:

• The Dark Side of Boston
• Boats Bridges & Locks
• Capt. Kidd’s Treasure Hunt
• Johnny Tremain’s Boston
• Charlestown
• Son of Boston: A Salute to Ben Franklin
• Footloose on the Freedom Trail
• The Greenway and Beyond

And don’t miss the special Tours of the Month offered on the last Sunday of each month at 2 pm:

• June 28: The Flat of Beacon Hill
• July 26: Exploring the Charles River Basin
• August 30: Preserving Boston’s History
• September 27: Ashmont Hill
• October 25: Bay Village

Jamaica Plain Historical Society – 1 hour tours every Saturday morning at 11 am (Jamaica Pond tour is 90 minutes).  Again, the tours in bold will be led by yours truly.

Tour Date	Location		Tour Date	Location
June 20	Woodbourne		August 22	Jamaica Pond
June 27	Jamaica Pond		August 29	Monument Sq
July 11	Monument Sq		Sept 12	Sumner Hill
July 18	Sumner Hill		Sept 19	Stony Brook
July 25	Stony Brook		Sept 26	Hyde Square
August 1	Hyde Square		October 3	Green Street
August 8	Green Street		October 17	Woodbourne
August 15	Woodbourne		October 24	Jamaica Pond

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In alphabetical order below are a number of other walking tours I’ve heard about by word of mouth or web search.  I only have personal experience with a few of these organizations so don’t consider making the list an endorsement. If you know of any good walking tours in Boston not listed below, I’d love to add them to the list, so please post in the comments.

Appalachian Mountain Club – The Boston Chapter has a Local Walks Committee offering hikes to condition oneself for the mountains, nature walks, and social walks.
Arnold Arboretum – Boston’s tree museum offers regular highlight tours and special theme tours. Come back again because the tour changes depending on the season.
Audissey Guides – Download a tour narrated by local personalities for your mp3 player.
Black Heritage Trail – A tour of African-American history in Boston led by National Park Service guides, or you can take a self-guided tour.
Evening Walkers – A Meetup.com group for people who like walking. No narration, just scenery and a chance to meet people.
Friends of the Blue Hills – Group hikes and nature walks in the Blue Hills Reservation.
Brookline Food Tour – The way to Brookline’s heart is through your stomach.
Boston Athenæum – Art and architecture tours of this respected independent library. They also offer tours for members should you be so fortunate.
Boston Harborfest – Walking tours are among the many events of Boston’s Independence Day celebration, including special Boston By Foot offerings.
Boston Harborwalk – A self-guided walk along Boston’s waterfront. Check the calendar for tours and  special events in the spring and summer.
Boston Movie Tours – Tinseltown comes to the Hub in this tour of film locations.
Boston National Historical Park – Tours of the Freedom Trail and Charlestown Navy Yard led by National Park Service Rangers.
Boston Nature Center – Birding tours, nature walks, and hikes in the heart of the city.
Boston Public Library – Regular art and architecture tours of the oldest municipal library in the US.
The Boston Spirits Walking Tour – A spooky walking tour focusing on Boston’s ghost stories.
Boston Town Crier – Freedom Trail tours led by character interpreters of James Otis and Benjamin Franklin.
Boston Women’s Heritage Trail – Nine self-guided walks exploring women’s history in Boston.
Boston Your Way – Hire a private guide for a customizable tour (I wonder if they’re hiring).
Cambridge Historical Society – The CHS events calendar currently includes a garden tour and historic house tours.
Discover Roxbury – Tours and events highlight the diversity of this historic neighborhood.
Fenway Park – Go behind the scenes at the home of the Boston Red Sox, the oldest and smallest ballpark in Major League Baseball.
Forest Hills Cemetery – Boston’s hidden gem is full of history, art, and architecture, all of which is illuminated by a good tour guide (read about a great tour we took in 2007).
Franklin Park Coalition – A self-guided tour, trails, and special events throughout the year in the “gem” of the Emerald Necklace.
Freedom Trail Tours – You can follow the red line on your own or let a costumed guide show you the way with 3 different 90-minute tours provided by the Freedom Trail Foundation.
Gibson House Museum – If you’re admiring the Victorian architecture of Back Bay and want to see a house interior, stop in here for a tour.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Society – Explore the new public space replacing the elevated Central Artery with special tours supported by Boston By Foot and other special events.
Harvard Campus Tour – Free student-led tours of the Harvard University campus.
Haunted Boston – 90 minute ghost tours of Boston.  Ask for Gretchen.
Historic New England – The HNE calendar offers neighborhood and historic property tours in Boston and throughout New England.
Irish Heritage Trail – A self-guided walk with guided tours in the works.
Learn English in Boston – Art and architecture tours of Boston for ESL students.
Lessons on Liberty – Costumed historical interpreters teach about Revolutionary Boston history along the Freedom Trail
Mass Bay Railroad Enthusiasts – Quarry to wharf tours of the remains of the granite railway in Quincy and Milton (part van, part walking tour).
MIT Campus Tour – Learn about the innovative architecture by world-renown architects that speckle the MIT campus.
Middlesex Fells – Check the calendar for special hikes or join the regular Babes in the Woods walks for parents and children.
Museum of Fine Arts – Regular free guided tours of the galleries (with museum admission) plus art & architecture tours outside of the museum.
The Nichols House Museum – If you’re admiring the Federal architecture of Beacon Hill and want to see a house interior, stop in here for a tour.
North End Secret Tour – Tours of Boston’s oldest neighborhood lead by a local resident.
The Path to Independence – Character interpreters offer a first-person historical perspective of the Freedom Trail.
Phantoms of Olde Cambridge -The ghosties of Harvard Square get their own tour.
Photowalks – Walking tours combined with instruction in photography on four different routes.
Paul Revere’s North End Walking Tour – An experienced guide from the Paul Revere House leads tours of the North End in early July.
South End Historical Society – An Annual House Tour is offered in October.
Unofficial Tours Present Harvard University – Fun tours of America’s first college.

Urban Adventours – Okay not a walking tour, but still cool environmentally-friendly and exciting bicycle tours of Boston.
Victorian Society in America/New England Chapter – Tours and talks of the Victorian heritage in Boston and its suburbs
WalkBoston – Boston’s walking advocacy group offers regular walks around the city.
Walking Tours of Historic Boston – Families and groups can book tours of Boston’s historic center lead by a children’s book author.
Watson Adventures Scavenger Hunts – A unique spin on the walking tour where participants gather together in teams to solve questions and puzzles.

Book Review: A Pocketful of History by Jim Noles

A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America — One State Quarter at a Time (2008) by Jim Noles takes the State Quarter Program as a launching point for an engaging look at the 50 United States and the symbols chosen to represent them.  Often, Noles goes beyond simply telling the history of the image on the coins to delve deeper into the social and cultural history of the States.  For each quarter, Noles also discusses the other finalist for the quarter design, the process of approval, and circulation of each coin.  The only thing I could ask for is more illustrations of the people and things he discusses.

My favorites include:

• revisiting my 4th grade social studies’ lesson of Connecticut’s Charter Oak (by far my favorite State Quarter).
• the importance of the palmetto in fort construction in Revolutionary South Carolina
• Rhode Island’s quarter inspires a history of yacht racing.
• the “scandal” of Ohio depicting a living person by including an astronaut who must be John Glenn or Neil Armstrong.
• Helen Keller’s Socialist ways make her an unlikely representative of Alabama as well as someone appearing on US currency.
• Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds, where you can keep the diamonds you find (I didn’t know it existed).
• exciting stories of storms on the Great Lakes make up for Michigan having the most boring quarter.
• the Kansas quarter leads to the history of the Buffalo Soldiers, regiments of African American cavalrymen who fought in the Indian Wars of the West.
• Colorado’s purple mountains majesty hid a CIA training camp for Tibetan subversives.
• Wyoming’s pioneering history in Women’s Suffrage.

The quarters open a door to learning about the states, their great people, buildings and places, arts, and flora and fauna (and their conservation).  Like the State Quarters themselves, A Pocketful of History will have a broad appeal beyond numismatic buffs.  I think it especially will be a good tool for teachers and children.

Author Noles, James L.
Title A pocketful of history : four hundred years of America–one state quarter at a time / Jim Noles.
Publication Info. Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, c2008.
Description xxvi, 324 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Boston Walking Tours

Spring is sprung, so it is a good time to get out and take a walking tour of Boston where one can learn about history, architecture, art, nature, society, or just get some fresh air. Since I love walking tours, I decided to pull together a list of the various tours available in Boston and neighboring communities. The two organizations listed below have primacy because I am a volunteer guide for them (don’t let that scare you away, the other guides are great). The rest are listed in alphabetical order. While I’m a fan of walking tours, I don’t tend to have the time to take as many as I like so be aware I only have personal experience with a few of these organizations so don’t consider making the list an endorsement. If you know of any good walking tours in Boston not listed below, I’d love to add them to the list, so please post in the comments.

• Boston By Foot – Boston’s premier walking tours with 7 regular tours offered daily, tours of the month, and special holiday tours.
• Jamaica Plain Historical Society -Weekly tours on Saturday mornings of 6 areas in the Eden of America.

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• Appalachian Mountain Club – The Boston Chapter has a Local Walks Committee offering hikes to condition oneself for the mountains, nature walks, and social walks.
• Arnold Arboretum – Boston’s tree museum offers regular highlight tours and special theme tours. Come back again because the tour changes depending on the season.
• Audissey Guides – Download a tour narrated by local personalities for your mp3 player.
• Black Heritage Trail – A tour of African-American history in Boston led by National Park Service guides, or you can take a self-guided tour.
• Evening Walkers – A Meetup.com group for people who like walking. No narration, just scenery and a chance to meet people.
• Friends of the Blue Hills – Group hikes and nature walks in the Blue Hills Reservation.
• Brookline Food Tour – The way to Brookline’s heart is through your stomach.
• Boston Athenæum – Art and architecture tours of this respected independent library. They also offer tours for members should you be so fortunate. [Suggested by Charles Swift in the comments below].
• Boston CityWalks – Four regularly scheduled walks and custom tours of Boston and Cambridge [Suggested by Alan in the comments below]
• Boston Harborfest – Walking tours are among the many events of Boston’s Independence Day celebration, including special Boston By Foot offerings.
• Boston Harborwalk – A self-guided walk along Boston’s waterfront.
• Boston Movie Tours – Tinseltown comes to the Hub in this tour of film locations.
• Boston National Historical Park – Tours of the Freedom Trail and Charlestown Navy Yard led by National Park Service Rangers.
• Boston Nature Center – Birding tours, nature walks, and hikes in the heart of the city.
• Boston Public Library – Regular art and architecture tours of the oldest municipal library in the US.
• The Boston Spirits Walking Tour – A spooky walking tour focusing on Boston’s ghost stories.
• Boston Town Crier – Freedom Trail tours led by character interpreters of James Otis and Benjamin Franklin.
• Boston Women’s Heritage Trail – Nine self-guided walks exploring women’s history in Boston.
• Boston Your Way – Hire a private guide for a customizable tour (I wonder if they’re hiring).
• Cambridge Historical Society – The CHS events calendar currently includes a garden tour and historic house tours.
• Discover Roxbury – Arrange a 90 minute tour for school, family, and adult groups of this historic and diverse neighborhood.
• Fenway Park – Go behind the scenes at the home of the Boston Red Sox, the oldest and smallest ballpark in Major League Baseball.
• Forest Hills Cemetery – Boston’s hidden gem is full of history, art, and architecture, all of which is illuminated by a good tour guide (read about a great tour we took last fall).
• Franklin Park Coalition – A self-guided tour, trails, and special events throughout the year in the “gem” of the Emerald Necklace.
• Freedom Trail Tours – You can follow the red line on your own or let a costumed guide show you the way with 3 different 90-minute tours provided by the Freedom Trail Foundation.
• Gibson House Museum – If you’re admiring the Victorian architecture of Back Bay and want to see a house interior, stop in here for a tour.
• Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Society – Explore the new public space replacing the elevated Central Artery with special tours supported by Boston By Foot.
• Harvard Campus Tour – Free official tours of the Harvard University campus.
• Historic New England – The HNE calendar offers neighborhood and historic property tours in Boston and throughout New England.
• Irish Heritage Trail – A self-guided walk with guided tours in the works.
• Learn English in Boston – Art and architecture tours of Boston for ESL students.
• Mass Bay Railroad Enthusiasts – Quarry to wharf tours of the remains of the granite railway in Quincy and Milton (part van, part walking tour).
• MIT Campus Tour – Learn about the innovative architecture by world-renown architects that speckle the MIT campus.
• Middlesex Fells – Check the calendar for special hikes or join the regular Babes in the Woods walks for parents and children.
• Museum of Fine Arts – Regular free guided tours of the galleries (with museum admission) plus art & architecture tours outside of the museum.
• The Nichols House Museum – If you’re admiring the Federal architecture of Beacon Hill and want to see a house interior, stop in here for a tour.
• North End Secret Tour – Tours of Boston’s oldest neighborhood lead by a local resident.
• The Path to Independence – Character interpreters offer a first-person historical perspective of the Freedom Trail.
• Phantoms of Olde Cambridge -The ghosties of Harvard Square get their own tour.
• Photowalks – Walking tours combined with instruction in photography on four different routes.
• Paul Revere’s North End Walking Tour – An experienced guide from the Paul Revere House leads tours of the North End in early July.
• South End Historical Society – An Annual House Tour is offered in October.
• Unofficial Tours Present Harvard University – Fun tours of America’s first college.
• WalkBoston – Boston’s walking advocacy group offers regular walks around the city.
• Walking Tours of Historic Boston – Families and groups can book tours of Boston’s historic center lead by a children’s book author.
• Watson Adventures Scavenger Hunts – A unique spin on the walking tour where participants gather together in teams to solve questions and puzzles.
• Women Artists in the Back Bay – A self-guided walk created by created in partnership by the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the support of the City of Boston, the Boston Women’s Commission, and the MFA Ladies Committee Associates.

Book Review: Language Visible by David Sacks

Language visible : unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z (2003) by David Sacks is a lively history of each letter in our modern alphabet (called the “Roman alphabet” which is explained in the book). For each letter Sacks traces the history of its shape from the ancient Semitic carvings in the Egyptian desert to Phoenician and Hebrew letters to Greek, Etruscan, and Roman alphabets to Old English and medieval Romance languages to minuscule characters of monastic scriptoriums and the first printed letters and finally our alphabet today. Some changes in the alphabet are surprisingly recent. J, V, and W are all relatively young letters. Noah Webster had an inordinate influence in setting apart American letters from European.

For each letter, Sacks also traces the changes in the sound the letter represents. If there’s one thing you learn from this book it’s that while many languages share the same alphabet there’s absolutely no consistency in what sounds the letters stand for and sometimes they’re somewhat arbitrarily assigned. Sacks also writes about the social and cultural significance of each letter which is the most fun aspect of the book. For example, he relates one of my favorite stories about how George Bernard Shaw suggested spelling the word “fish” as ghoti, that is the “gh” of rough, the “o” of women, and the “ti” of station. Ghoti would make a great band name by the way and you wouldn’t even be able to be sued for copyright infringement by a Vermont jam band. Sacks also explains how the Anglo-Saxon letter thorn for the “th” sound was represented by the letter Y. This is why someone 200-years ago would write “Ye Olde Tavern” and pronounce “ye” as “the.”

This is a good read – both fun and educational.

Boston By Foot Tour of the Month: Art Deco

In my spare time, I lead tours as a volunteer guide for the wonderful organization Boston By Foot. Right now I’m in my second year as co-chair for the Tour of the Month committee. I don’t actually lead these tours but coordinate everyone else involved from writing the tour manual, leading the tour to collecting admission fees and making sure the tourees don’t get lost.

Photos from the Art Deco Tour of the Month

I love the Tour of the Month because it gives our talented guides and researchers a chance to learn about the history and architecture off the beaten path in Boston. This season’s first Tour of the Month on Memorial Day weekend was no exception. If you asked me a year ago where to find Art Deco architecture in Boston, I’d tell you to go to New York or Chicago. But plenty of Art Deco structures are hiding in plain sight in Boston’s Financial District.

One of my favorites is the Batterymarch Building, now a Hilton hotel:

One doesn’t usually associate red brick with Art Deco architecture, but there are several brick Art Deco structures on this tour alone! Of course, brick is a standard building material in Boston, so the architects adapted brick to their own purposes.

Another stunning building is the New England Telephone Building on Post Office Square which includes this intricate detail work over the front door:

I never thought to go inside this building before, but it’s worth checking out. There is 360 degree mural over the lobby dedicated to the men and women who worked in the telephone industry. They’ve also reassembled Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory into a nifty little museum with an audiovisual presentation.

The stepped, trapezoidal shape of the Second National Bank of Boston contains some of the most prominent Art Deco decoration in the city:

Of course I’ve passed the building hundreds of times without even noticing.

Check out more photos from the tour in my online gallery at Othemts.com.

The next Tour of the Month is of the Bulfinch Triangle on Sunday June 24 at 2pm, so come on out for a fun, educational experience.

Book Review: The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn

Another book about babies. This one is thankfully free of gory details. Instead The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, & Patricia K. Kuhl examines developmental psychology in children. It turns out that babies are a lot like scientists in the ways they interact with their new world and test assumptions. Or maybe scientists are like babies because it is in our earliest years that we first develop our capacity for learning.

The authors examine how babies recognize other people and themselves, differentiate objects, and develop language. They also have instinctive means to train adults and older children to help in their development. This book is a lot of fun and a fascinating read.

Favorite Passages:

It may be some comfort to know that these toddlers don’t really want to drive us crazy, they just want to understand how we work. The tears that follow the blowup at the end of a terrible-twos confrontation are genuine. The terrible twos reflects a genuine clash between children’s need to understand other people and their need to live happily with them. Experimenting with conflict may be necessary if you want to understand what people will do, but it’s also dangerous. The terrible twos show how powerful and deep-seated the learning drive is in these young children. With these two-year olds, as with scientists, finding the truth is more than a profession — it’s a passion. And, as with scientists, that passion may sometimes make them sacrifice domestic happiness. – p. 38.

The two most successful examples of human learning turn out to be quite similar. Children and scientists are the best learners in the world, and they both operate in very similar, even identical ways, ways that are unlike even our best computers. They never start from scratch; instead, they modify and change what they already know to gain new knowledge. But they are also never permanently dogmatic — the things they know (or think they know) are always open to further revision.

While the idea that scientists are like children might seem surprising at first, it helps make sense of some otherwise puzzling facts. Scientists, after all, have the same brains as the rest of us. And science is convincing because, at some level, all of us can recognize the value of explaining what goes on around us and predicting what will happen in the future. … Why would we have such powerful learning abilities if we never even used them back in the Pleistocene? …

Our answer is that these abilities evolved for the use of babies and young children. – p. 156-7

Reviews:
BrainConnection by Anne Pycha

NEA by
Marcia D’Arcangelo and Andrew Meltzoff.
Science Blog

Jamestown 2007 – America’s 400th Anniversary

As detailed in this post about Jamestown, the buried truth, I’ve been greatly anticipating the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the Western hemisphere. May 13, 1607 is the date of the founding of Jamestown by the Virginia Company (although some sources state May 14, since that is the day the colonists went ashore and started building. I’ll go with the 13th since that is also my sister’s birthday). I first visited Jamestown as a geeky 11-year old in 1985 and even at that time I calculated that I could be alive for the 400th anniversary, albeit impossibly old. Turns out I’m not as old as I imagined, but I’m still geeky and love commemorations of historic events. Since I lived in James City County, VA (the modern continuance of Jamestown) for 7 years, and worked in a living history museum in Virginia, this was an event I could not miss.

My photos from Jamestown 2007 – America’s 400th Anniversary

The key event is patriotically called America’s 400th Anniversary cleverly overlooking the priority of St. Augustine while advancing Jamestown’s claim over those upstarts in Plymouth, MA. Jamestown does have the advantage that it plays a role in beginning one of the colonies that would eventually form the original United States whereas Florida is in territory acquired later, so Jamestown is central to the story of the American experience from its very beginning. This point was emphasized by stressing the “birth of democracy” (basically the election of the Virginia Company’s chairmen of the board in 1619) and the “birth of slavery” since captured Africans first arrived in America for forced labor at Jamestown, also in 1619. Another interesting point is that Jamestown is the first place in the world where people of Europe, Africa, and indigenous Americans lived and worked together, albeit far from an ideal community.

The anniversary weekend took place 11-13 May and my mother and I attended on Sunday, the final day. Due to a visit by President Bush, access to the site was restricted from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm and people who were already there were pretty much in a lockdown situation. So we decided to arrive in the afternoon, after the President departed, and security was less stringent. The logistics for the event were excellent, especially the use of satellite parking in numerous lots in the area with school buses shuttling visitors to Jamestown. The scenic Colonial Parkway basically became a convoy of yellow buses as well as a staging area for emergency vehicles. The bus was full of happy, chatting people and was a good way to start the day. Oddly, many people who still live in the area went out of town (including my mother’s co-workers) but they were counterbalanced by the soldier we met on the bus who used his leave from Iraq to come Jamestown.

We arrived first at Jamestown Settlement, which looks very different from when my mom worked there and when I volunteered with the museum registrar to help count rocks. Not only is the museum expanded and redesigned but they’ve even realigned a road around the parking lot! We visited the living history exhibits at Jamestown Settlement which for maybe the first time ever were densely populated with costumed historic interpreters. One of the first employees I met was my friend and former housemate Lara although we did not get to speak for long. We wandered through the recreated James Forte, down to the ships, and back to the Powhatan village.

Next we took the bus to the actual site of the original settlement at Historic Jamestowne, property which is administered jointly by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). Things have changed there quite a bit since my last visit as well, especially since the APVA hired Dr. William Kelso to conduct an archaeological excavation which uncovered the remains of the original James Fort used from 1607-24, and many other fascinating discoveries. We arrived just in time to hear Bill Kelso speak which may have been the highlight of the day for me. I don’t think Kelso ever finished his presentation because he got a bit choked up the the magnitude of the day, but he received a well-deserved standing ovation. After strolling through the fort site and taking a lunch break by the river, we waited in line for the brand new Archearium a museum containing the relics, um, I mean artifacts from Kelso’s Jamestown Rediscovery excavations. The wait was long to get into the small museum, made longer because we chose to visit the gallery with the skeletons. While in line we saw that the elderly woman behind us had a pewter broche from the Jamestown tercentenary in 1907 which was pretty cool. What was not cool is that the younger woman pushing the elderly woman’s wheelchair kept pushing it into my heels, and didn’t seem all to sorry about the pushiness either.

While wonderful to visit all the museum sites on THE DAY, they definitely will be worth a more comprehensive return visit in the future. Footsore and facing closing time at the museums, we headed over to the Anniversary Park to relax with entertainment. Anniversary Park was once the Jamestown Beach Campsites and I’m said to see it’s gone (unless they campground owners just rented the land out for the weekend). We stayed at that campground on our first visit to Virginia in 1985 and it has sentimental memories. Anniversary Park consisted of a giant stage and a grassy area for the audience as well as some exhibition tents that we never had time to see.

There were a lot of people in Anniversary Park when we arrived including the 1,607-voice choir and 400-piece orchestra performing. For some reason I expected all those musicians to be really loud but in the “back rows” the music sounded faint even when amplified.

Following the concert, emcee Dr. Rex Ellis told us we had a “special treat,” a performance entitled “Journey of Destiny.” Subtitled: “Hokey-hontas.” Told through a bizarre mix of interpretive dance, historical pageants, and dramatic readings of primary documents, “Journey of Destiny” recreated Jamestown history in an incredibly cheezy manner.

Once that was over, the Governor of Virginia and family dropped some things in the time capsule. Rex Ellis told us that the time capsule had a CD-player, DVD-player, and batteries for future generations to use to watch and listen to the items within. I suspect those things will be rusted and inoperative. But I’m a librarian, and librarians and archivists hate time capsules.

For a finale, fireworks lit up the chilly night sky accompanied by the 400-piece orchestra. That may be the first time I’ve ever seen fireworks with live music which is pretty cool even if the musical selection was odd for the event (The 1812 Overture? The Star Wars main title theme?) It was all good fun though, and a nice finale. Despite being in a crowd of up to 30,000 people we were able to get to our shuttle bus and back to home fairly swiftly.

Lots more about Jamestown’s Birthday at the Library of Congress blog.

News reports:

• Virginia Gazette
• Newport News Daily Press
• Richmond Times Dispatch
• Washington Post
• Boston Globe

 

Other blogs:

I searched Technorati to find posts by other people who attended the Jamestown 2007 events but didn’t have much luck. Most posts were simply reporting on the event or criticizing them (or reporting on Bush’s visit and criticizing him). If you attended America’s 400th Anniversary please post your thoughts in the comments and/or link to your blog. Thanks!

• Pink Leader’s Pontifications
• Where the hell are we?
• The Wandering Camera
• jim_p
• Ancarett’s Abode

Also in my searches I found this map of the College of William & Mary as Middle-Earth, which has nothing to do with Jamestown but it’s damned funny.

Somerville Works Together Against Child Obesity

My hometown made the front page of the Wall Street Journal on May 10, 2007 (As Child Obesity Surges, One Town Finds Way to Slim: Somerville, Mass Goes Beyond Schools to Push Exercise, Good Eating by Tara Parker-Pope). I do love how they characterize a densely-populated urban area as a town.

Anyhow, it’s good to learn things you don’t know about your own community from nationally-published media. It sounds like an intelligent program that’s achieving excellent results.

The Somerville study is believed to be the first controlled experiment demonstrating the value of a communitywide effort. It’s only a small dent, but slowing the pace of weight gain among kids is the key to conquering childhood obesity, says lead author Christina Economos, an assistant professor at Tufts University. “It could be the difference between graduating overweight and graduating at a normal weight,” she says. “We need to think about how it plays out long term.”

The Somerville program, designed primarily by Dr. Economos and fellow researchers at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition, offers a surprising blueprint. It didn’t force schoolchildren to go on diets. Instead, the goal was to change their environment with small and inexpensive steps. Dr. Economos, a specialist in pediatric nutrition and the mother of two school-age children, has long believed that the battle against obesity can’t be fought at the dinner table alone but requires social and political changes.

For inspiration, she turned to other successful social movements of the past 40 years, analyzing tobacco control, seat-belt use and breastfeeding. All were thorny public-health problems lacking a quick fix, yet significant progress was made on each. In 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded Dr. Economos a $1.5 million grant to find out whether the same social forces could work in nutrition.

The goal of the researchers’ Shape Up plan was to have Somerville children burn more calories through exercise and take in fewer with a healthier diet, for a total benefit of 125 calories a day.

I’m particularly pleased by the efforts to encourage walking to school. I live next to an elementary school, and each day a convoy of cars jam up the streets of our neighborhood as parents drop kids off. This bothers me for several reasons:

1. All the wasted gas and emissions caused by driving kids to school when numerous other options are available. School buses, for one, would be more efficient. Walking and public transit are even better.
2. The congestion caused by all those cars. Again school buses would reduce the traffic, but the roads are narrow so they still might cause obstructions. Thus walking and public transit are still better options.
3. <cranky old man voice> When I was a boy I walked 3/4′s mile to elementary school every day! Why when I was in middle school I walked nearly a mile just to get to the bus stop. Kids these days! </cranky old man voice> A true cranky old man would add “And we liked it!” to the end, but I’m young enough to remember that I hated it, especially when it was cold. Still I do see parents walking their children to school and that looks like fun for everyone.

Anyhow, I need Mayor Joseph Curtatone to advocate for programs to help me lose weight too.

Library News for April

Here’s my latest collection of news and opinion of interest regarding the library.

The World Almanac puts out a call for help to librarians (and includes links to even more librarian blogs than I already read). Having been a compulsive reader of The World Almanac since childhood, I stammer and drool when I hear my help is needed.

Lots of discussion regarding issues regarding the homeless in libraries (hey, the homeless are patrons too!):

• homeless and libraries and the high cost of perceived safety, by Jessamyn West on librarian.net
• How the Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel, by Chip Ward in TomDispatch
• Discussion at MetaFilter: Don’t mind me, I’m dead

ACRLog debates the future of the Reference Desk. I’m all in favor of an hovering reference-o-matic platforms myself.

This doesn’t really have much to do with libraries, although it is a book that will be in libraries, and the coolest website around: No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July.

I totally want to hang this flyer from Tinfoil + Raccoon in my library. I like the Spinal Tap reference especially.

Tame the Web reports on a Looking for a Good Book readers’ service at Williamsburg Regional Library. This warms the cockles of my heart since this once was my local public library and it’s good to see them at the forefront of technology. The two libraries in the system despite their small size have excellent collections. In fact, when I was in college I often found books I needed at Williamsburg Public Library that were checked out or otherwise unavailable at the college library.

Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog has a good tribute to the book, which in itself is an advanced form of technology. Makes sense, after all I have a degree in Library Science to deal with this technology.

As if I needed BBC news to tell me, LIBRARIANS SUFFER THE MOST STRESS!!!!. Circ and Serve has suggestions for how to manage your time and multi-task to help reduce that stress (none of which involve beer kegs at the circ desk).

That’s it for the cruelest month. There are many librarians a-tap-tap-tapping on their keyboards, so I’ll have more to share in the merry month of May.

An Assemblage of Assorted Articles

Once again I’ve read and collected news articles and blog posts that are worth sharing but have absolutely nothing to connect them together except maybe that they teach us something interesting. Enjoy!

• The Boston Globe contains a story from AP about a Maine man announcing for president — as Thomas Jefferson.
• From the Christian Science Monitor, Gloria Goodale writes ‘Baby Loves Disco’: clubbing for the Mommy-and-me set in which we learn that having kids doesn’t mean giving up dancing because baby likes to boogie too.
• From the Christian Science Monitor, Annie Sherman writes Backstory: She keeps the lighthouse fantastic about Sally Snowman the keeper of Boston Light (Susan and I met her on our wedding anniversary adventure to Boston Light).
• From the New York Times, Tracie Rozhon writes To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime in which we learn that happily married couples are no longer sharing a bed (just like Lucy and Rickey).
• From Escar-go-go, Robert David Sullivan writes Sacre Bleu Line! in which we discover that the MBTA’s new website has much too literal translations into French.
• From MediaChannel.org, Danny Schecter writes The Politics of Music and Music As Politics appreciates the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for protecting the genre’s heritage amid corporate corruption.
• From Mother Jones, Bill Mckibben writes Reversal of Fortune in which we learn that More isn’t Better.
• Streetsblog and Sarah Goodyear share StreetFilms: Interview with Parking Guru Donald Shoup who teaches us that free parking and expensive housing are backwards thinking.
• From Bicycle Fixation, James Howard Kunstler asks Can America Survive Suburbia?
• From the Boston Globe, Chris Kahn writes that a Glass skywalk opens above the Grand Canyon with the help of astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Anytime you can involve Buzz Aldrin it automatically makes things better.