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Massachusetts 
Massachusetts has many sea ports
Capital: Boston
{State bird, chickadee} {State flower, mayflower} {State tree, American elm}
Boston
is East Coast at its best, and spending a few days there is recommended.
It's a place that isn't content to rest, history is visible, but
there's a great deal of modern life , thanks in part to the presence of 
Cambridge
, the home of Harvard University. Several historic towns are within
easy reach, Salem , Concord, Lexington , and Plymouth, Provincetown
, a three hour ferry ride across the bay at the tip of Cape Cod, is great
to visit, and the rest of the Cape offers historic towns, nice beaches
- and huge crowds. Except for a handful of college towns such as Amherst,
inland Massachusetts is much quieter; its settlements are naturally concentrated
where the land is fertile, such as along the Connecticut River valley and
in the Berkshires to the west.
SALEM is remembered less as the site where the colony of Massachusetts was first established, with the most elevated of intentions, than as the place where just sixty years later Puritan self-righteousness reached its apogee in the horrific witch trials of 1692. While the town itself was to prosper as a port - as evidenced by its fine old buildings - the witch scare did much to discredit the idea that the New World conducted its affairs on a different moral plane than the Old
The trouble with standing on Cape Cod these days is that "all America" tends to be a lot closer behind you than you might prefer. Its main tourist haunts are packed in summer, its roads circled by a grim procession of crawling vehicles, searching in vain for some "unspoiled" bit of beach or "undiscovered" old town. Unless you have your own, preferably very secluded, place to stay, it's barely worth turning up at weekends, especially between June and August, and putting yourself through the hassle of trying to find what little available accommodation there is, invariably at premium prices. However, the place is undeniably beautiful and if you find yourself in the region midweek in May or September - when hotel prices are much lower, the crowds have thinned, and the weather usually very pleasant - it's certainly worth a visit.
Cape Cod was named by Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602, on account of the prodigious quantities of cod caught by his crew off Provincetown. Less than twenty years later the Pilgrims landed nearby; in the few months before moving on to Plymouth, they began the process, continued by generations of Europeans, of stripping the interior of the Cape bare of its original covering of thick woods. Today, much of the land on the Cape - from its salt marshes to its ever-eroding dunes - is considered a fragile and endangered ecosystem, a designation, however, that hasn't especially dampened the persistence of developers.
If you imagine the Cape as an arm, its upper section, the thirty-mile eastward stretch closest to mainland Massachusetts, would be represented by the biceps. Much of the worst beachfront development lies along the southern shore, and Hwy-28 , running from Falmouth via Hyannis to Chatham, gets especially clogged. Only once you get beyond the "elbow" and head north to the Outer Cape or, anatomically speaking, the forearm, past the spectacular dunes of Cape Cod National Seashore , do you get a feeling for why the Cape still has a reputation as a seaside wilderness. Provincetown , right at the end, is the one town on the Cape that can be unreservedly recommended.
Sadly, the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket , off the Cape to the south, are dependent on summer tourism for their livelihood. However, a trip out to Nantucket in particular does still evoke haunting memories of its proud seafaring days. Again, the off-season has a charm all its own, a time when you can sink into the rhythms of life on the island without the distraction of hordes of day-trippers.
As you head northward out of Boston, you pass through a succession of rich little ports that have been all but swallowed up by the suburbs. The most obvious day-trip from Boston is the half-hour ride out to Salem . Nearby Marblehead , on the other hand, gave us the US Navy : George Washington's first five vessels were built there. If you have the time, the atmospheric old fishing ports of Gloucester and Rockport , further out on Cape Ann , have strong literary and artistic links: T.S. Eliot used to come here for his family vacations, and the Dry Salvages of the third of his Four Quartets are a group of offshore rocks. They're also the best places on the east coast for whale-watching trips: Cape Ann Whale Watch offers three- to four-hour trips between April and October.
The 150 miles of Massachusetts that stretch inland to the west of Boston have always been obliged to play second fiddle to the state capital. Just ten years after the Revolution, the farmers who struggled to make a living from this indifferent soil so resented the imposition of taxes by the prosperous merchants of the east that they rose in Shay's Rebellion ; their pitchforks were no match for the guns of the new nation.
These
days the citizens of the west are eager to promote themselves as cultural
rivals of the big city, with the Berkshires hosting the celebrated Tanglewood
music festival in summer. Amherst , the home of such diverse talents as
Emily Dickinson and Dinosaur Jr, is a stimulating little college community,
as is its larger neighbor, Northampton ; both have all the cafés,
restaurants and bookstores you could want. Another delightful college town
is Williamstown in the far northwest corner, set at the end of the incredibly
scenic Mohawk Trail.
