CD is located on Boston’s North Shore, in Salem, Massachusetts, once America’s sixth-largest city and its largest port of trade. Within hailing distance stand the landmarks that past generations have conferred on us: the Custom House, from which Nathaniel Hawthorne oversaw the collection of import duties when he was not writing The Scarlet Letter; the House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne’s other famous subject); and Lyceum Hall, the site of Alexander Graham Bell’s first public demonstration of long-distance telephony. Salem gave us the National Guard, while neighboring Marblehead is the birthplace of the American Navy and of Marine aviation. The first missionaries to Asia sailed from Salem.
Trade, technology, the creation of ideas, and the construction of public goods and institutions – these are the historical backdrops for CD and its forays into the international competitive dynamics of “science and the useful arts.”
Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum
