Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a frosty, blue-skied Sunday morning. In New England there is always this feeling that history is not too far away. Just around the corner from my hotel is a monument to the field where in 1775 George Washington took command of what was to become the U.S. Army (indeed, the hotel is named after the event and has a scale model of it in the lobby (see picture). War booty, in the form of British cannons, surround the monument. A little further along is an atmospheric old (1635) burial ground where some of the earliest settlers, landowners, slaves, soldiers, presidents of Harvard and ‘prominent men of Cambridge’ were laid to rest. In such places at such times America still feels like a very young country proud to have fought for, and won, its freedom.