Every culinary revolution needs an early adopter willing to be stared at, and in Newport it was apparently an Italian marine painter. A good small story about how a whole region came round to something the rest of us now take for granted on pizza.

After a summer of nervous headlines about the Davis Square building being put up for sale, the theatre's future looks settled. A century-old single-screen-and-stage palace that also hosts folk shows owning its own roof is about as cheering as Boston real estate news gets.

Every famous invention has an unfamous inventor somewhere upstream, and Morey has a better claim than most. Notice the range: steamboat, an early internal combustion engine and even a primitive car, all from a man most people have never heard of.

Long before turnpikes and rest stops, a Boston schoolmistress set off on horseback for New Haven and New York, and kept a sharp-tongued journal of the inns and guides along the way. Her account is one of the best windows we have on everyday colonial travel. Imagine the Yelp reviews.

Forget dropped r's and 'wicked'. In Berlin, up in the North Country, French Canadian mill families and their English-speaking neighbours cooked up a mixed vernacular odd enough that someone wrote a dictionary of it. A nice reminder that New England speech has more layers than the Boston accent.

New England folklore that turned into real neurology. Lumberjacks at Moosehead Lake who leapt and echoed words when startled became a newspaper sensation, and then a research project for George Beard, who tried reciting Homer at one of them. The trail ends, unexpectedly, at Gilles de la Tourette.

A short, affectionate history of the Cambridge room where the folk revival got a lot of its early practice. Dylan sneaking in between sets and old blues masters being brought north are the famous bits; the more charming one is how a gift shop slowly turned back into a stage.