Eric, hello. On 2013 Sep 22, at 16:30, Eric Hanchrow <eric.hanch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My wife and I will be in Boston a day early (Friday). Does anyone > have a "must-see" touristy suggestion for us? Along with seemingly everyone else, I'd recommend the Freedom Trail. I don't know where you're visiting from, but speaking as a visitor to Boston and to the US, I found the Freedom Trail to be a very illuminating account of the US foundation myth, at a humane scale. I can't think of an analogue for the UK myth (which itself is rather thought-provoking), and the analogues for other countries tend towards the bombastic. It also shines an oddly-angled light on one phase of my own country's colonial history, and on its current pseudo-colonial adventures. The trail goes past, but doesn't explicitly include, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Regiment_Memorial>, from which (I think) I 'got' the US civil war in a way I hadn't before, and which made me feel more foreign in the US than anything I've noticed since, in a smattering of visits across the country. I'm not normally a fan of heritage sites, which generally call out for rather detached and against-the-grain interrogation. But the Boston Freedom Trail is both successful in its own terms and (not, I think, accidentally) interesting as rhetoric. Enjoy RacketCon. All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
