Tours in Cambridge

Three history buffs founded Boston Strolls with the goal of highlighting their city's fascinating and often hilarious forgotten tales. Launching in Beacon Hill, the tours have now expanded into the Back Bay and North End. Today, guides lead all tours past historic brick and stone facades, as well as the occasional Bruins shrine, and immerse participants in an interactive exploration of Boston's lesser-known history.

In addition to their sometimes dark and often humorous anecdotes, they also personalize the tour to each group by judging the knowledge base of their participants and accommodating anyone who is allergic to Boston. Even with their careful planning, the tours often take surprising turns. On one tour, a homeowner invited the group around a private wall to see the house's private garden that, in traditional Beacon Hill fashion, was completely hidden from all other passersby.

HipHost taps into the teeming river of local pride that runs through every city to power its huge range of sightseeing tours. Locals eager to unveil the true history and hotspots of their beloved home can contact the company to become tour hosts. Once new guides have set up their tour and peppered the website with pictures of the many sites to be seen, HipHost directs guests their way. Visitors might learn the history of an important historical figure such as Paul Revere on a Boston walk fueled by Little Italy's pizza and local craft brews, or they might skip the history lesson and, like a centipede in search of a stool, crawl from pub to pub in New Orleans. HipHost encourages guests to thank, review, and tip the local hosts for sharing their time and expertise.

Cambridge Historical Tours unearths nearly 400 years of history during informative jaunts that cast light on the area's captivating, funny, and sometimes gory past. Sheathed in authentic puritan attire, guides lead groups on 90- and 120-minute treks back in time, fusing wholesome doses of humor with laboriously researched facts. Guests raise an imaginary glass at the house of John Hicks, a participant in the Boston Tea Party, and absorb the eerie ambiance of the Cambridge Burial Ground, where many of Harvard's early presidents are buried. The extended 120-minute tour reveals such sights as the picturesque Longfellow House, which was seized in 1775 to become George Washington's quarters, presumably so he could practice his putting game on the property's lush lawns.

Bastions of the abolitionist movement, Boston and its progressive citizens helped motivate activists across the nation to stand against slavery, thus fanning a flame that contributed to the Civil War. During a 90-minute Boston Civil War tour, groups walk among historically significant sites where figureheads such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison publicly asserted their outrage and sought refuge from enraged mobs. While strolling through Beacon Hill on Sunday, knowledgeable guides point out the African Meeting House—a recruitment center for Massachusetts' all-black regiment—and the homes of famous authors such as Louisa May Alcott, who pulled from her experience as a Union Army nurse to write Hospital Sketches in 1863.