For long weekends, romantic getaways, and family vacations, the BEST PLACES TO STAY series describes an array of distinctive accommodations for discriminating travelers. The authors personally visit and evaluate each establishment, compiling accurate, reliable, up-to-date, and unbiased information for anyone who insists on nothing but the best. Country Inns; Bed & Breakfasts; Lodges, Spas; Resorts; Romantic Hideaways; Guest Farms; Grand Old Resorts. Describes more than 350 accommodation choices in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

New England’s Colonial Inns and Taverns explores the history of these institutions and visits those that are still around. Today, there’s no better remedy for the winter blues than a visit to a Colonial tavern. For centuries, travelers who have stepped out of the cold and into a tavern have found not only hearty Yankee fare, but also a feast for the senses: the warmth of a roaring fire, the creaking of uneven plank floors, the intoxicating incense of a smoky hearth and mulled apple cider, the taste of a cocktail chased by a swig of history. Centuries ago, taverns offered respites for weary wayfarers on horseback. Today, they remain welcome havens from high-speed lives.

The massive destruction wreaked by the Hurricane of 1938 dwarfed that of the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and the Mississippi floods of 1927, making the storm the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Now, R.A. Scotti tells the story.

"Quaint, charming, nostalgic New England: rustic fishing villages, romantic seaside cottages, breathtaking mountain vistas, peaceful rural settings. In Inventing New England, Dona Brown traces the creation of these calendar-page images and describes how tourism as a business emerged in the nineteenth century and came to shape the landscape, economy, and culture of a region. She examines the irony of an industry that was based on an escape from commerce but served as an engine of industrial development, spawning hotel construction, land speculation, the spread of wage labor, and a vast market for guidebooks and other publications." "By the mid-nineteenth century, New England's whaling industry was faltering, lumbering was exhausted, herring fisheries were declining, and farming was becoming less profitable. Although the region had once been viewed as a center of invention and progress, economic hardship in the countryside fueled the development of the tourist industry. Before that time, elite vacations had been defined by the "grand tour" up the Hudson River to Saratoga Springs and Niagara Falls. Recognizing the potential of middle-class vacations, promoters of tourism fashioned a vision of pastoral beauty, rural independence, virtuous simplicity, and ethnic "purity" that appealed to an emerging class of urban professionals. By the latter nineteenth century, Brown argues, tourism had become an integral part of New England's rural economy, and the short vacation a fixture of middle-class life." "Focusing on such meccas as the White Mountains, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, coastal Maine, and Vermont, Brown describes how failed port cities, abandoned farms, and even scenery were churned through powerful marketing engines promoting nostalgia. "Old salts" dressed in sea captains' garb were recruited to sing chanteys and to tell tales of old whaling days to crowds of mesmerized tourists. Dilapidated farmhouses, "restored" to look even older, were transformed into quaint country inns. By the late nineteenth century, much of New England was highly urbanized, industrial, and ethnically diverse. But for tourists, the "real" New England was to be found in the remote areas of the region, where they could escape from the conditions of modern urban industrial life - the very life for which New Englanders had been praised a generation earlier." "In an epilogue that addresses the "packaging" of Cape Cod in the twentieth century, Brown discusses how human choices - not scenery - create a market for tourism. With fascinating anecdotes about entrepreneurial innkeepers, farmers, and others, Inventing New England explores the early growth of a new industry that was on the cutting edge of capitalist development even though its cultural "products" appeared untainted by market transactions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Gloucester's Rocky Neck evolved into a microcosm of American art that has never been surpassed. This book offers an in depth look at America's oldest working art colony with over 130 fine art reproductions from the artists who painted there.