🧠 🏛️ This Salem day trip will make you smarter

🇺🇸🎉 With the 250th anniversary of America’s founding approaching, now’s the time to romanticize your local history — and luckily, you don’t have to go far to do it.

👀 What’s on tap this evening:

Up first…

✒️ Everyone knows how the Declaration of Independence got signed — but do you know how it actually spread? (Hint: Massachusetts, and Salem in particular, were doing a lot of the heavy lifting.)

🚃 In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, we teamed up with the Peabody Essex Museum to map out a low-effort, high-reward Salem day trip that mixes history, ocean air, and a museum stop that’s way more interesting than anything you remember from a middle school textbook.

😌 This is your excuse to leave Boston for a few hours, learn one new thing, and come back with a niche Revolutionary War fact you’ll absolutely bring up later.

📜 Before group chats and breaking news alerts, information spread the old-school way: printed flyers, word of mouth, and public readings. So when the Declaration of Independence was created… how did anyone actually hear about it?

🧔 Enter: Salem printer Ezekiel Russell, who helped produce early copies and get them into circulation (aka the original “share” button). At PEM’s Pressing Importance: Salem and the Declaration of Independence, you can see those early broadsides up close, alongside newspapers and pamphlets that show how the news spread across the colonies.

👀 It’s a quick, tangible look at how a big idea actually reached people — and why that part matters just as much as the signing itself.

💡 Once you’ve absorbed some knowledge, it’s time to touch grass (and maybe the ocean). Besides, no trip to Salem would be complete without a walking tour through some of the historic neighborhoods, cobbled streets, and hidden gardens.

🧱 PEM happens to have one of the largest architecture collections in the country, and you can explore it through PEM Walks — a self-guided audio tour that takes you to 15 different sites around the city.

🧙 You’ll pass everything from homes dating back to the Salem Witch Trials to the iconic Ropes Mansion (yes, that one from Hocus Pocus). It’s part history tour, part scenic stroll, and part spooky season fix for anyone already wishing it was October. 

😅 At some point, you’ll realize you’ve been walking for a while. That’s your cue to stop into Kakawa Chocolate House for a much-needed sweet treat before wrapping up your day.

🤔 What to order? If you want to stay on theme, go for the 1790s Jeffersonian Elixir, inspired by colonial-era recipes and featuring subtle notes of nutmeg (Pro tip: get the whipped cream. This is not the time for restraint). 

⚓️ Right next door, PEM’s Marine Hall Mercantile is worth a quick stop too. Expect nautical finds, books, small gifts, and objects inspired by Salem’s global trade history — aka things you didn’t plan on buying but will absolutely be thinking about on the train ride home.

👆Fun fact: there’s only one official signed copy of the Declaration of Independence — and it wasn’t even created until weeks after the document was first published.

The version most people actually saw in 1776 was a printed broadside (basically a flyer), with around 200 copies made and distributed across the colonies. Only a few dozen still exist today, and they didn’t even include all the famous signatures at first.

So yes — the Declaration of Independence technically went viral before the signed version ever existed.

— Written by Tori Waltz (The editorial team was not involved in the creation of this B-Side Extra Edition

💐 Thanks for reading! If you need us, we’ll be pretending we’ve always been into Revolutionary-era printing logistics.

💜 Special shoutout to today’s sponsor, the Peabody Essex Museum, for sponsoring this extra B-Side send and making history feel like a day out worth bragging about.

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