Cell-Phone Tour of Cambridge—That’s Revolutionary!

This is the second and last Cambridge Discovery Day of 2011. I’ll lead a walking tour on the theme of “1775: Cambridge as the Seat of Civil War” starting at 3:00 P.M. on Cambridge Common at the Washington Gate—that’s the stone structure on the corner closest to Harvard Square.

For folks who can’t make that or want more, last year the Cambridge Historical Society set up a website on “Cambridge and the American Revolution,” researched and writen by Caitlin Deneen and Anna Gedal. It highlights thirty-three sites of Revolutionary significance in the city, some for what used to be there and some for what still stands.

There’s an interactive map of the sites; clicking on the dots takes you to webpages with photographs of the historic buildings, if there are any. (It’s clearer to see how things changed between those photos and now than between the 1770s and those photos.)

The site also offers a cell-phone walking tour (P.D.F. download) prepared by Gedal focusing on the public sites in central Cambridge. I’m going over some of the same ground tomorrow, but also going off the map.

(Photograph of the Washington Gate above by Wally Gobetz, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.)