Portsmouth, NH

Portsmouth, New Hampshire is the state's only seaport and one of the oldest cities in America — settled in 1623 at the mouth of the Piscataqua, whose ferocious tides raced generations of clipper ships to sea. Its colonial and Federal streetscapes survive in rare completeness: the Strawbery Banke museum quarter preserves four centuries of the neighbourhood as lived history, and sea captains' mansions line the lanes to the working harbour. World history called once: the Treaty of Portsmouth, negotiated at the naval shipyard in 1905, ended the Russo-Japanese War and won Theodore Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize.

The archive's New Hampshire stage is The Music Hall of 1878, one of the oldest theatres in New England — a Victorian jewel-box saved by its citizens, now the city's beloved venue for concerts, opera broadcasts and a famous writers' series. An editorial note is required for the registry: the second venue under this heading, the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts, belongs to Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio — the Ohio River town of floodwall murals and Roy Rogers's birth — and the relevant event records should be split accordingly, as with Cleveland. The New Hampshire original, salt-aired and book-mad, remains among the smallest great cities on the Atlantic.