2023-24
JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient
I’m Out For Superintendents to Represent Me: The Evolution of Boston’s Freedom Trail and Public History
Andrew Smith
I’m Out For Superintendents to Represent Me: The Evolution of Boston’s Freedom Trail and Public History
Andrew Smith
2024 Near Scholar
Mentors: Dr. Chuck Witschorik and Mrs. Lauri Vaughan
April 10, 2024
The memory of America’s inception is paramount to the nation’s identity. The words, the missions, and legacies of the United States’ founders have been adapted throughout American history to enshrine and justify the development of the nation. To few other parts of America’s Revolutionary history is national heritage as closely tied as to that of eighteenth-century Boston, where a comparatively early movement for independence fermented and sparked the first conflicts of the American War of Independence. Thus, it follows that the representation of that legacy is hotly contested. After all, as historian Martin Blatt asserted, “Boston, perhaps more than any other place in the nation, is the venue where America invented itself.”1 Just as contemporary understandings of the nation’s history evolve as a product of the biases, movements, and attitudes of the period, public historiography, or an examination of the evolution of public history, describes the ways that biases, movements, and attitudes shaped the commemoration of the past.
In the period following the Second World War, the way historical memory was constructed by monuments and museums in Boston was shaped by profit and tourism.2 The Freedom Trail, a loosely coordinated collection of preserved historic sites united by a connection to Boston’s colonial history and a red brick line winding through sidewalks, streets, and parks across the city, was created in 1951 “as a wayfinding device and a marketing tool, not an interpretive framework to help visitors find important Boston sites nothing more and nothing less.”3 As a result of the prioritization of profit, the history presented by the Freedom
1 Martin Blatt, "Boston's Public History," The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 11, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.11.
2 Seth C. Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), 8.
3 Freedom Trail Foundation, "Freedom Trail Establishment," The Freedom Trail, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.thefreedomtrail.org/about/freedom-trail-establishment; Nina Zannieri, "Report from the Field: Not the Same Old Freedom Trail A View from the Paul Revere House," The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 46, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.43.
Trail’s sites was an afterthought, meant to commemorate the histories most appealing to visitors.
During the Cold War, patriotic tourists fulfilling their civic duty by a pilgrimage to Boston were greeted with tales of storybook founding fathers whose consensus and ideology mirrored the “fears and anxieties of the Cold War years.”4
Despite the motivations underlying its inception, the historical vision exhibited in the Freedom Trail eventually came to incorporate complexity and significance for visitors in the 1990s. The interpretive programming at historical sites was, and remains, explained by a “museological triangle,” in which “visitors, museum personnel, and historians and academics,” or the stakeholders of public history, exerted their influence and interests at varying degrees to shape how history is enshrined.5 The same model applies to the stakeholders and the public audience of the Freedom Trail, which developed between 1984 and 2000 in order to bring public history to align with contemporary academic historical understandings of the Revolutionary period and other significant periods of Boston’s past.
These shifts in historical interpretation along the Freedom Trail developed during John Burchill’s time as superintendent of the Boston National Historical Park (BNHP), a major institutional stakeholder that has brought the resources of the National Park Service (NPS) to Boston’s scattered public history landscape since its inception in 1974.6 Rather than contributing to the Freedom Trail, however, the superintendent elevated profit-seeking institutions at the cost of meaningful public history and exhibited white-supremacist biases in his personal beliefs and professional visions for his park.7 Aside from the historical activism of a few stakeholders,
4 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 82.
5 Teresa Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism: Creating and Contesting Interpretations of American Historic Sites (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 19-20.
6 Boston National Historic SitesAct, S. 210, 93d Cong., 1973-1974. (Oct. 1, 1974).Accessed April 24, 2023. https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/senate-bill/210.
7 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 225.
Burchill’s BNHP worked in opposition to the confluence of factors changing the Freedom Trail under his feet throughout his tenure, also between 1984 and 2000.
In the song “The World Is Yours,” off his seminal 1994 album Illmatic, the quintessential American rapper Nas from Queensbridge, New York delivered the iconic hook “I’m out for presidents to represent me. (Say what?)”8 At the same time as Nas asserted his canonical claim on a public representation in the highest echelons of power, Bostonian communities formed coalitions and organizations to seek a voice of their own, to assert a claim on how public history represented their national and city heritage. “I’m Out for Superintendents To Represent Me” alludes to those Bostonians whose involvement with the Freedom Trail in the late 1990s contributed to a fundamentally altered public memory that rejected the conservative historical ideology of superintendent John Burchill. National historiographical trends, Bostonian demographic shifts, and the emergence of the discipline of public history precipitated shifts in narratives of Boston’s past, as told between 1984 and 2000 through the Freedom Trail, from nationalist heritage and narrow, whitewashed tourism-promoting stories toward more critical and progressive interpretation.
“Not only would it add to the personality of the city, but it would also please the tourists:”
The Evolution of the Freedom Trail before 19849
Boston’s pride in its own history and Revolutionary heritage, although ubiquitous today, was not always central to the city’s identity. In 1809, John Adams noted the profound neglect of the young republic toward the stories of its independence, regretting that figures such as “Samuel
8 "The World Is Yours," produced by Pete Rock, on Illmatic, performed by Nas, Sony Music Entertainment, 1994, Vinyl LP.
9 Bill Schofield Evening Traveler article "Have You Heard," March 8, 1951, Folder: Fr. Tr. Foundat., BNHP Archives.
Adams and John Hancock were ‘almost buried in oblivion.’”10 The city’s apathetic attitudes led to the demolition of many sites of historical significance to the memory of the Revolutionary war, with many of the preserved sites on the Freedom Trail having barely escaped the fate of buildings like John Hancock’s mansion.11 In time, the tradition of historical preservation would take hold, but was shaped by its priorities of politics and profit. The historical and preservation societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries organized during a time of colonial revivalism and patriotic nostalgia.12 The conservative beliefs of such associations were characteristic of the Whig ideologies pervasive for over a century, that built a monument at Bunker Hill in a commemoration excluding “the lowly or disenfranchised,” that “portrayed the Revolution as an inevitable stride toward liberty by visionary men,” and that capitalized on the growing heritage tourism industry of the early twentieth century.13 Many of the historic sites later included on the Freedom Trail were managed or owned by historic preservation societies, including the Paul Revere Memorial Association (1905) of the Paul Revere House, the Bostonian Society (1882) of the Old State House, the Old South Association (1877) of the Old South Meeting House, and the Bunker Hill Monument Association (1823).14
Decades later, the public history landscape of Boston would again change when on March 8, 1951, Bill Schofield’s column “Have You Heard” in the Boston Evening Traveler popularized an idea that would soon materialize into the Freedom Trail:
10 Alfred F. Young, "Revolution in Boston? Eight Propositions for Public History on the Freedom Trail," The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 21, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.17.
11 Young, 21.
12 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 29-30.
13 Bruggeman, 27-28, 31.
14 Paul Revere House Site Summary, Folder: Boston NHP - Site Summaries, BNHPArchives, 2; Old State House Site Summary, Folder: Boston NHP - Site Summaries, BNHPArchives, 5; Old South Meeting House Site Summary, Folder: Boston NHP - Site Summaries, BNHPArchives, 5; Bunker Hill MonumentAssociation, last modified 2021, accessed March 23, 2024, https://bunkerhillmonumentassociation.com/.
All I’m suggesting is that we mark out a ‘Puritan Path’ or ‘Liberty Loop’ or ‘Freedom’s Way’ or whatever you want to call it, so they’ll know where to start and what course to follow. The way [Old North Church Rector Robert M.] Winn visualized it, you could do the trick on a budget of just a few dollars and a bucket of paint. Not only would it add to the personality of the city, but it would also please the tourists. He proposes a series of attractive signs, arrowed in such a way as to guide a visitor from one shrine to the next along the most convenient foot-route. That’s all there is to it.15
As demonstrated by the thinking behind the Freedom Trail’s inception, “the trail had almost nothing at all to do with the Revolution. The Freedom Trail, rather, as had been the case with Revolutionary memory in Boston for over a century, was always about the future,” particularly the identity and the economy of the city to come.16 On March 8, 1951, Mayor John B. Hynes dedicated the Freedom Trail, “a series of painted signs along 30 prominent street corners pointing toward Old Boston’s most famous historical shrines,” which today includes Boston Common, the Massachusetts State House, Granary Burying Ground, the site of the Boston Massacre, the U.S.S. Constitution, and other preserved churches, buildings, and cemeteries from the eighteenth century.17 (See Fig. 1).
15 Bill Schofield Evening Traveler article "Have You Heard," BNHPArchives; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 43.
16 Bruggeman, 47-48.
17 The full list of Freedom Trail sites includes: Boston Common, the Massachusetts State House, the Park Street Church, Granary Burying Ground, Kings Chapel & Kings Chapel Burying Ground, the original site of the Boston Latin School, the Old Corner Bookstore, Old South Meeting House, Old State House, the site of the Boston Massacre, Faneuil Hall, the Paul Revere House, Old North Church, Copp’s Hill Burying Gound, the U.S.S. Constitution, and the Bunker Hill Monument; Freedom Trail Foundation, "Freedom Trail," The Freedom Trail; Freedom Trail Foundation, "Historic Sites," The Freedom Trail, accessed March 28, 2024, https://www.thefreedomtrail.org/trail-sites.
Future efforts and investments in Boston’s heritage continued to follow a profit-minded agenda, meant to support urban renewal in the post-war period. Amidst the economic depression of the 1950s, Mayor John Hynes championed a campaign of major city-planning projects that began with extensive slum-clearance in multiculturally rich neighborhoods like Boston’s West End and South End, displacing tens of thousands of families.18 The Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), the city organization responsible for such projects, eventually pivoted away
18 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 82, 113-14.
from demolition and to reinvestment in commercial districts and privatization after the federal Housing Act of 1954, but a decade later had only relocated a fraction of the displaced families.19 It was out of the 1950s’ concentration on economic planning, and the partnerships that developed between Boston’s City Hall and Chamber of Commerce, that the next stakeholder in the Revolutionary heritage industry emerged.20 (See Fig. 2).
19 Bruggeman, 83, 114, 74.
20 Bruggeman, 74.
The first iteration of an umbrella organization involved with the Freedom Trail, which had previously formed a collection of sites independently managed by the city, the state of Massachusetts, various historical societies, and other organizations each with their own “Freedom Trail” signpost, was the Freedom Trail Committee.21 Founded in 1958 by Richard Berenson and Robert Friedman of the Boston Advertising Club to revive the heritage industry amid economic downturn by “organizing and coordinating the historic sites of Boston,” the committee was “funded by various banks and businesses, including the John Hancock Life Insurance Company, and with the aid of the Chamber of Commerce, the Freedom Trail Committee renovated the trail” and promoted tourism.22 Overwhelmed by their success and skyrocketing attendance, in 1946 the Committee sought incorporation as the non-profit Freedom Trail Foundation, formed to “maintain, sustain, preserve, promote, further improve, augment, and publicize the Freedom Trail,” serving as the umbrella Freedom Trail organization involved with its individual sites.23 Next, the Freedom Trail Commission was created by the Massachusetts legislature in 1965, which outlined “an independent board, consisting of five unpaid commissioners selected by the mayor” meant to involve “Boston’s city agencies the traffic department, the parks and recreation department, the public works department.”24
Although the organizations were, in essence, run by the tourism-focused Richard Berenson of the Boston Ad Club, the Foundation was “focused mainly upon the marketing and promotion of the trail,” whereas the Commission became the decision-maker behind the Trail, determining its route, inclusion of sites, and funding.25
21 Since 1919, the Bunker Hill Monument had been managed by the state-run Metropolitan District Commission; Bruggeman, 45, 50, 22; Matt Grief Freedom Trail Commission Report, 1995, Folder: TBS New Exhibit, BNHP Archives, 2.
22 Matt Grief Freedom Trail Commission Report, 2.
23 Matt Grief Freedom Trail Commission Report, 2.
24 Matt Grief Freedom Trail Commission Report, 3.
25 Matt Grief Freedom Trail Commission Report, 2-3.
The final addition to the network of institutional stakeholders in Boston’s public history, the Boston National Historical Park, was shaped by “the story of how politicians, real estate developers, business leaders, urban planners, and a whole cast of pundits sought to [support Urban Renewal, or] re-engineer Boston into a city that could harvest wealth newly distributed among white Americans, especially after World War II.”26 The group laying the framework to involve the NPS in Boston, the Boston National Historic Sites Commission (BNHSC), was chaired in 1955 by Urban Renewal proponent Mark Bortman, who proudly celebrated that the planning commission failed to include any historical experts and specialists, whom he felt would complicate their work.27 Ultimately, the BNHSC’s final report prompted the creation of the Minuteman National Historical Park in the nearby city of Concord, established in 1959 just outside Boston, and recommended the removal of migrant populations as an endorsement of urban renewal’s manufactured manifestation of an idyllic, colonial Boston.28
Efforts to create the BNHP were renewed after the Navy announced its plans a decade later in 1968 to close its historic Charleston Navy Yard in 1974 and city planners learned that Philadelphia, not Boston, would host celebrations for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976.29 In a rush to find alternatives to receive bicentennial-related federal funding, BRA Director John D. Warner proposed a “national historic park [with] a naval-marine museum on the site of the Charlestown Navy Yard.”30 When a bill to create a national park in Boston reached the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, however, the NPS voiced concerns discouraging the bill, as money-minded “Politicians, that is, not historians, had come to decide what history parks
26 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 10, 8.
27 Bruggeman, 55-57, 77.
28 Bruggeman, 71, 75-76, 81.
29 Bruggeman, 16-17, 101-02.
30 Bruggeman, 101-02.
would be about.”
31 Ultimately, the patriotic fervor and Cold-War desires to invest in the Bicentennial won out, and the Boston National Historic Sites Act was passed on October 1, 1974.
32 (See Fig. 3).
Park, 1960.
31 Bruggeman, 10-11.
32 Bruggeman, 125; Boston National Historic SitesAct, S. 210, 93d Cong., 1973-1974. (Oct. 1, 1974).Accessed April 24, 2023. https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/senate-bill/210.
Because of the limitations on the park regarding its historical work, the BNHP had little immediate impact on the interpretation and presentation of Revolutionary history. Through the park, the NPS came into direct management of the Bunker Hill Monument, the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the Dorchester Heights Monument, but the BNHP’s contributions are notable for its partnership framework, “alone [having] the financial resources, the capacity for major research projects, and a large skilled staff, including park rangers who manage the visitor’s center and conduct tours.”33 Upon establishment, the BNHP came into partnership with some, not all, of the independent sites under the Freedom Trail including the Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, the Paul Revere House, the Old North Church, and the USS Constitution Museum.34 The nature of each partnership varied, as the Bostonian Society and Old South Association of the Old State House and Old South Meeting House regularly collaborated with NPS interpretive staff on exhibits, whereas the Old North Church’s historical materials were prepared independently.35
The organizational divisions of the BNHP include the distinct departments of administration, interpretation, and cultural resource management, with the position of park historian housed within the latter, suggesting the senior historian at the BNHP was intended to maintain and research in-house historical assets rather than be involved with outward-facing historical interpretation. The distance between professional historians and public history was exacerbated by the fact that “hiring staff with history training does not appear to have been a priority” at the park.36 Thus, when Paul Weinbaum joined as the BNHP’s first historian in 1981,
33 Draft Interpretive Prospectus, 1985, Folder: Interpretive Prospectus - Notes, Comments, BNHPArchives, 3-4, 11; Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 40.
34 Blatt, "Boston's Public," 12.
35 Draft Interpretive Prospectus, BNHPArchives, 17.
36 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 158.
nobody knew what he was supposed to do. The NPS Denver Service Center, which lacked familiarity with Boston and the complexities of its memory, was more involved in interpretation than the park historian, and Weinbaum’s attempts to contribute to historical accuracy led to tensions between the interpreters and himself.37
With the absence of history in the planning and structure of the Freedom Trail and BNHP, the Whig concepts of inevitable ideological conflict and Cold War themes of patriotic consensus continued to permeate Revolutionary interpretation during Boston’s massive Bicentennial celebrations and throughout the 1970s.38 Amidst the era’s high attendance and nationalist heritage along the Freedom Trail, visitor engagement was characterized by exhibitions of “living history,” in which visitors were immersed in a nostalgic colonial era, harkening back to the colonial revivalism that first spawned the heritage industry, through the excitement of costumed interpreters or live reenactments.39 Such interpretation is best described as “Longfellowian,” where public history paints the contours of colonial Boston as reminiscent of the 1860 iconic poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
37 Bruggeman, 159, 175, 17, 178.
38 Bruggeman, 128, 130.
39 Bruggeman, 127.
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.40
40 "Paul Revere's Ride," 1860, in The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1903), accessed March 24, 2024, https://www.paulreverehouse.org/longfellows-poem/.
Longfellow’s poem immortalized Paul Revere, providing a model for lionizing other patriots into the storybook legends who acted as the heroes in the Freedom Trail’s Revolutionary narratives.
While Boston’s public history would eventually promote visitor enthusiasm through innovative methods of commemoration and by incorporating complex histories representing a broader swath of audiences, tourists before the 1990s were immersed in historical heritage using Longfellowian interpretive engagement techniques.
By the 1980s, the Freedom Trail had evolved into a complicated web of institutional stakeholders. Individual sites were responsible for the preservation, promotion, maintenance, and interpretation of their own historical buildings or resources, being managed by private organizations, like preservation societies or religious groups, or public authorities, including the state of Massachusetts, the NPS, or the city of Boston. All sites had connections with larger organizations, whether indirectly, through the tourist promotion and advertising of the Freedom Trail Foundation, or directly, under the umbrella authority of the Freedom Trail Commission. Some sites not managed by the NPS received further assistance in their responsibilities via partnership with the BNHP, which contributed financial assistance and historical resources, and others kept their operations and historical interpretation entirely independent.41 Because of the network of managing institutions with each stakeholder’s priorities, the Freedom Trail had no single narrative or history.42
41 Draft Interpretive Prospectus, BNHPArchives, 17.
42 The outlier in Boston’s historical landscape during the 1970s was the Museum ofAfro-American History, founded by Byron Rushing in 1972 in theAfrican Meeting House and neighboringAbiel Smith School, built in 1806 and 1835 respectively, in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Rushing was an early proponent for historical interpretation extending beyond the Revolution, as “The period that [planners were] talking about was really for all intents and purposes a revolution for White people. Because for the period [planners were] talking about, Black people, most Black people, were enslaved.” In 1980, the BostonAfrican American National Historic Site (BOAF) was established, bringing further resources to the museum’s “focus on historical research. . . . [and] exploring African American History.” Unlike any other public history institution on or around the Freedom Trail, the purpose of the Museum ofAfro-American History and the BOAF were, from the beginning, to do and to teach and along the way, to make history; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 184-86; Kenneth C. Turino, BethAnne Bower, and
Academics and Adaptations:
Revolutionary Social Historiography and Public History Professionalization
Historical narratives of the American Revolution developed and shifted in the centuries following the conflict and tensions of eighteenth-century Boston, because of the state of the world and evolving values of historians. Because of the stark differences between their creators and stakeholders, public history and academic history diverged as the evolving values of those formally creating public memory on the Freedom Trail hampered interpretation from reflecting contemporary historical beliefs, despite academic history growing more representative of modern Boston. Revolutionary historiography evolved in the late twentieth century, historical narratives cherry-picked from across the centuries were incorporated into interpretation, and the national public history movement professionalized Boston’s historical institutions and, ultimately, changed the nature of their work.
In the era of America’s infancy, historians were very willing to omit aspects of the formative Revolutionary period, contributing to Boston’s indifference toward preservation during the early nineteenth century.43 At this time, Whig historians went unquestioned as they justified how they “fought the War of Independence for constitutional principles to protect freedom from tyranny,” as the discipline lacked substantive rigor.44 The first legends of Boston during the 1770s put to paper in the nineteenth century were dramatized by storyteller-historians like Benson J. Lossing and George Bancroft, whose gripping “rhetoric could be overblown.”45 Polly Welts Kaufman, "Boston Museum and Exhibit Reviews," The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 83, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.80.
43 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 21.
44 John E. Selby, "RevolutionaryAmerica: The Historiography," OAH Magazine of History 8, no. 4 (1994): 5, JSTOR.
45 Edward Countryman, "Historiography," in Encyclopedia of the American Revolution: Library of Military History, 2nd ed., by Harold E. Selesky and Mark M. Boatner (Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006), no. 1, Gale in Context: U.S. History.
46
Then, in 1861, Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride was published, carrying an abolitionist message beyond New England through “nostalgic invocations of the American Revolution.”
Historical storytelling remained a defining feature of the early twentieth century, as were the narratives “mostly about power and authority” with their top-down approach “creat[ing] a sense of national identity.”47 The imperial turn of the expanding United States contributed to a sympathetic appreciation of the British perspective and the first major step toward a complex interpretation of the Revolution. During this time, historians began to appreciate the benefits of British citizenship and protections offered to the North American colonies during the Seven Years War, particularly from the imperial navy and military protection from the French. Moreover, friendlier attitudes toward the British expanded to British-allied colonists, as the unpopular Tories were referred to as Loyalists.48 In the first half of the twentieth century, military history was brought to the forefront and historians examined the British military as it interacted with the American colonies and responded to conflict from an unexpectedly successful, rowdy militia of colonists.49
During the Cold War, these sympathetic histories faded as the United States entered a fragile standoff against the Soviet Union. The uniformity of the post-war culture spread into academia, which produced consensus histories projecting unity onto the American patriots.50 By invoking the Revolution as a “bygone era of American ‘solidarity,’” historians reminded audiences in Cold War distress of a time in America’s past when liberty and solidarity triumphed over a tyrannical empire of diametrically opposed values.51 Bernard Bailyn’s 1967 The
46 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 26.
47 Boston History Collaborative Presentation,April 1999, Folder: The History Collab, BNHPArchives, 4.
48 Selby, "RevolutionaryAmerica," 5-6.
49 Countryman, "Historiography."
50 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 82.
51 Bruggeman, 55.
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution popularized an ideological take on the Revolution, as he and other Classical Republican historians explored the Roman, Greek, and Enlightenment ideas that would shape the War and the Early Republic, reflecting the ideological opposition that drove the United States against communism worldwide.52 The unrest and discontent of the 1970s and the Vietnam War era shook up these narratives, and increasingly skeptical historians once again rewrote their understandings of the past. The Civil Rights, feminist, and similar social movements sparked broader conversations around marginalized perspectives throughout national history, the Revolution included.53 The “problems [of this new social history] were not about extraordinary acts and thoughts of extraordinary people, but the ordinary experience of ordinary people.”54 The historiographic shift was marked by an incorporation of further empiricism and rigor into history.55 The first step of the discipline shift in Revolutionary history was rethinking the causes behind the movement for independence.56 Historians turned away from republican ideology to ask whether the driving motivations were political or economic, and how the new Republic came to be defined by market forces rather than ideology.57 Social history acknowledged a bleaker past, contrasting the commemorative aura of Cold War historiography, noting achievements and shortcomings as “the Revolution fits into a long-range vision of Americans enlarging and redefining freedom as an ongoing process.”58
52 Classical Republicans were members of a historiographical trend of scholars whose histories of theAmerican Revolution identified primarily ideological factors that contributed to tensions; Selby, "RevolutionaryAmerica," 6-7.
53 Selby, 7.
54 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 5.
55 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 5.
56 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 129.
57 Bruggeman, 129.
58 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 23.
The new social history pivoted Revolutionary memory from viewing independence as a conflict against England to a movement of colonists “confronting Great Britain but also confronting each other.”59 Part of this complexity paralleled historiographical developments elsewhere, as a “broadened cast of characters who participated in the shaping of well-known events” represented the perspectives of marginalized groups in the colonial period with an “emphasis on ordinary people who were often at odds with their betters.”60 Historians published texts on the role of slavery and Black colonists on either side of the Revolution throughout the 1970s and began to examine gender in the Revolution and throughout the colonial era during the 1980s.61 During the same period, the perspective of Native Americans during the eighteenth century and their tensions and military conflict with colonists were incorporated into histories.62 The new social history addressed class, by depicting the socioeconomic structure of colonial society and acknowledging the radical side of the Revolution. In this respect, Alfred Young was an important figure in the early adoption of a bottom-up perspective on the Revolution and the colonies, providing complexity along with Jesse Lemisch, Robert A. Gross, and others.63 Young, a decorated historian of class and radicalism, was best known for his 1981 essay “George Roberts Twelves Hewes (1742–1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” which examined populist themes in the context of the making of public Revolutionary memory and was honored as among the most influential pieces published in the William and Mary Quarterly in the second half of the twentieth century.64 Young’s
59 Young, 23.
60 Young, 23.
61 Selby, "RevolutionaryAmerica," 7-8.
62 Countryman, "Historiography."
63 Selby, "RevolutionaryAmerica," 7.
64 Gary B. Nash, "Alfred F. Young (1925-2012)," Perspectives on History, last modified March 1, 2013, accessed January 11, 2024, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/march-2013/inmemoriam-alfred-f-young.
academic contributions and historical activism, specifically his involvement in Boston’s public history in the 1990s, made him a recurring character in the development of the Freedom Trail.
Historiography of the Revolution and the discipline of public history evolved during a similar period, ultimately becoming fundamental causes of a shifting Freedom Trail twenty years later. In 2011, historians panned an exhibit on the Middle Passage and Atlantic Slave Trade produced by the New York Historical Society for one-dimensional historical interpretation inconsistent with academic scholarship.65 Among the installation’s critics, historian Alan Singer wrote that the interpretation “offered very broad simplifications that present platitudes about the past two hundred years rather than an accurate account or historical analysis.”66 Remarkably, observers countering academic criticism felt the solution would be “a law that keeps historians away from history exhibits, ” who “know too much about a subject to be able to distill what they know into comprehensible exhibit formats.”67 While the proposal concerned the keepers of public memory and a national historic culture, it captured the conflicting responsibilities of public historians to bring accurate, relevant, and engaging interpretations of the past to the masses.
Broadly defined, public history encompasses “the ways in which the past is created and presented in the public arena as history,” or how history is disseminated, taught, and addressed outside the classroom or academic sphere.68 Public historians design exhibits, guidebooks, and reports, preserve cultural resources in archives, buildings, or artifacts, and coordinate with various publics, communities, and visitors.69 The audience of works of public history are the
65 Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism, 19.
66 Bergman, 19.
67 Bergman, 19.
68 David Dean, "Introduction," 2017, in A Companion to Public History, Blackwell Companions to World History (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 2.
69 Dean, 2-3.
fundamental distinction from the academic field tired tourists or professional scholars.70 On this balancing act between interpretive rigor and accessibility, Paul Revere Memorial Association Director Nina Zannieri describes Boston’s historic sites as at once preservation projects (with roofs that can leak and basements that get damp), classrooms (responsive to shifting school curricula and standards), businesses (with bottom lines), and civic icons (keepers of the nation’s memory). Some of these roles fit comfortably with the work we do with and as historians, and others are driven by completely different imperatives.71
Before public history was considered its own academic field, professional training in history for museological administration or interpretation was decentralized and sparse. While curatorial training and resources existed for specified disciplines like art and natural history, programs in general public history began in the late 1940s through efforts of organizations including the National Park Service, steward “of nationally significant historical, natural, and recreational resources” since 1916, the New York State Historical Association, and the Society of American Archivists.72 From the 1950s to the 1980s, Colonial Williamsburg, the American Association of Museums, and other state and national public history organizations developed the first graduate programs, seminars, and resources “to assure an adequate supply of personnel equipped with both sound scholarly training and an understanding of the problems, techniques, and potentialities of presenting history through other media than the book and the lecture.”73 The
70 Dean, 3.
71 Zannieri, "Report from," 51-52.
72 John H. Sprinkle, Jr., "Centennial Dilemmas," in A Companion to Public History, ed. David Dean, Blackwell Companions to World History (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 312; Rebecca Conard, "Complicating Origin Stories: The Making of Public History into an Academic Field in the United States," in A Companion to Public History, ed. David Dean, Blackwell Companions to World History (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 21.
73 Conard, 23-24.
1970s marked the coming-of-age of public history, as the Public Historical Studies graduate program at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), established in 1976, declared public history to be an independent discipline.74 The UCSB programs and the similar Winterthur and Cooperstown graduate programs, organized in 1952 and 1964 respectively, brought a historical “method of analysis and explanation to bear upon points at issue, just as public administrators, economists . . . and other professionals have brought their expertise into policy making.”75 By 1978, a survey by the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History identified forty-eight university departments of history “as being engaged in a ‘curriculum change’” toward professional graduate training for Masters and Doctoral students.76 UCSB’s journal The Public Historian, formed in 1978 and eventually the discipline’s foremost journal, characterized these programs as part of a “public history movement” as guidelines standardized the burgeoning study in the late 1970s and early 1980s.77 Today, the National Council on Public History recognizes 308 different university-affiliated programs, spanning undergraduate and professional degrees in public history and adjacent curricula.78
During the 1970s, the public history movement produced a surplus of job seekers from newly developed graduate programs in applied history training, with market forces pushing young, progressive historians into history careers outside universities.79 The maturation of public history as a discipline and the development of professional interpretive staffs would be
74 Conard, 19, 27.
75 The Winterthur Graduate Program inAmerican Materials Culture was established with the University of Delaware, and the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies was founded under the State University of New York, Oneonta; University of Delaware, "Winterthur Program inAmerican Material Culture," University of Delaware, accessed February 14, 2024, https://www.winterthurprogram.udel.edu/; Conard, 19, 26.
76 Conard, 27.
77 Conard, 27-28.
78 National Council on Public History, "Guide to Public History Programs," National Council on Public History, accessed January 13, 2024, https://ncph.org/program-guide/.
79 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 129.
indiscernible in Boston, however, until the 1980s.80 Still, the eventual introduction of professionally trained historians into Boston’s heritage industry would, in time, drive the incorporation of critical and substantive historical narratives into Freedom Trail interpretation.
Although Boston’s historical preservation societies originated out of the nationalist nostalgia of colonial revivalism in the late nineteenth century, the Paul Revere Memorial Association, steward of the Paul Revere House, was among the earliest sources of critical public history on the Freedom Trail thanks to its professionalization during and after the Bicentennial.81 The Association hired its first professional director in anticipation of the Bicentennial’s heritage tourist crowds, but the Paul Revere House began substantive change after Nina Zannieri joined as executive director in 1986.82 Zannieri, whose historical training was a direct product of the public history movement, oversaw the modernization of interpretation and educational programs at the Revere Memorial Association, which shifted from glorifying the icon of Longfellow’s poem to recognizing a family man and artisan with a broader chronological period of interpretation with respect to his North End neighborhood before and after the Revolution.83 Later in her career, Zannieri would serve on the Board of the American Alliance of Museums, aforementioned as a major actor in the development of public history training, and as President of the New England Museum Association.84 The leadership of someone like Zannieri who believes that public historians and related institutions “have a responsibility to tell their multifaceted stories while providing a lively, thoughtfully conceived interpretive program grounded in serious scholarship that is appropriate for both tourist and local audiences alike”
80 Bruggeman, 130.
81 Bruggeman, 28-31.
82 Bruggeman, 205.
83 Nina Zannieri received her masters degree from Brown University in Museum Studies andAnthropology; Zannieri, "Report from," 46-47, 43.
84 Zannieri, 43.
marked a new era in history-making that starkly contrasted Boston’s profit-focused Post-War and Bicentennial eras.85
Professionalization in other Freedom Trail stakeholder organizations began during the same period. The Bostonian Society and the Old South Association, managers of the Old State House and Old South Meeting House respectively, each hired their first professional staff members around the Bicentennial, though it would take time for interpretation at the sites to reflect a nuanced and critical history of the Revolution.86 The Freedom Trail Foundation, pet project of Richard Berenson and the Boston Advertising Club, would hire a professional staff in the 1990s, including public historian Candace Lee Heald in 1990, the Foundation’s first executive director Fred Davis in 1992, and progressive feminist historian Nancy Grey Osterud in 1993.87
While history may not have been front of mind for its planners, the staff of the Boston National Historical Park played a critical role in the professionalization of public history along the Freedom Trail. Beyond the efforts of park historians Paul Weinbaum, Louis Hutchins, and Martin Blatt to produce accurate and substantive historical interpretation, the National Park Service contributed the insights of public historians like Peter Steele, Park Assistant Superintendent for Planning and Development.88 Although BNHP administration resisted a thematic shift in historical narratives, the Park’s interpretive staff during the 1990s came to
85 Zannieri, 49.
86 Zannieri, 46.
87 Heald held degrees from University of Delaware, birthplace of the first graduate public history program, and Osterud was a Ph.D. from Brown University inAmerican Civilization; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 213-14.
88 Steele studied History at Yale College and received a master’s degree in History Museum Studies from the State University of New York Cooperstown Public History Program; Pitcaithley Letter to Lindsey Reed and The Public Historian journal, April 18, 1989, Folder: Interpretive Planning History Project - Correspondence, BNHPArchives; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 221-22, 207; Blatt, "Boston's Public," 11; Batesville, "Peter Steele 2017 Obituary," Douglass Funeral Home, last modified May 24, 2017, accessed February 7, 2024, https://www.douglassfh.com/obituary/peter-steele.
include individuals like Ranger Celeste Bernardo and Supervisory Park Ranger of Downtown Interpretation Tony Tommell, who contributed to a new focus on history on the Freedom Trail between 1984 and 2000.89
“The King would be defied, with highly-principled, visionary men to lead the way . . . ” Interpretation along the Freedom Trail between 1984 - 198990
Although the 1980s were a time of professionalization and the introduction of history as a touchstone for the staffs of Boston’s public history institutions, it took time for their representations of Boston’s past on the eve of the Revolutionary War to catch up. Superintendent Burchill began his tenure at the Boston National Historical Park as the Freedom Trail emphasized historic themes with origins in Whig and Cold War historiographies. Boston’s historical portrayals drew in tourists by immersing them in the storybook Boston of Longfellow fame, painting the lead-up to the Revolution as an ideological struggle against tyranny seen through the lenses and heroic deeds of iconic figures. The state of interpretation between 1986 and 1990 remained little changed from 1951 and was attributable to the conservative guidance of Burchill and the BNHP administration, the continuing dominance of profit-centric stakeholders, and challenges faced by public historians during the period.
The interpretive vision of the late 1980s is reflected in the NPS’s 1985 Interpretive Prospectus, released and overseen by Burchill’s BNHP administration.91 The report outlines then-current interpretive mechanisms, themes, and proposals for history-telling along the Freedom Trail.92 Among the major themes, the Prospectus recommended further interpretation
89 Bernardo held a master’s degree in history from Northeastern University and Tommell transferred from the U.S. Marine Corps Museum in Virginia; Celeste Bernardo, "Celeste Bernardo," LinkedIn, accessed February 8, 2024, https://www.linkedin.com/in/celeste-bernardo-42889715; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 207.
90 Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, May 20, 1988, Folder: Freedom Trail - Script +Annotations, BNHP Archives, 2.
91 Draft Interpretive Prospectus, BNHPArchives, 1.
92 Draft Interpretive Prospectus, 5.
on “Boston’s contribution to the rise of self-determination in England’s American colonies and the development of the thought and action that eventually led to American freedom and independence.”93 The BNHP’s focus on the ideology, particularly the ideas of freedom and liberty that motivated the movement for independence, is typical of Cold War histories of Revolutionary America, as part of the 1950-60s “Classical Republicanism” historiographic perspective which projected an anti-communist social consensus onto American colonists unified against the dangers of a tyrannical Britain.94 Superintendent Burchill signed off on such interpretation when he submitted revisions of the Interpretive Prospectus report to the National Park Service Regional Director for the North Atlantic Region, describing the interpretation’s historical significance with the rationale that when “the ideas and ideals of self government were formulated, a new nation was born.”95
More explicitly, a draft of the 1985 Prospectus included the interpretive theme of “Boston’s role in the struggle for freedom and independence,” overlaying that Cold-War opposition between the United States and the USSR onto the American Patriots and Great Britain.96 The theme was altered when the Chief of Visitor Services, responsible for touristfacing park operations, wrote to the Chief of Interpretation, responsible for representing history, that “the word ‘struggle’ still sets my teeth on edge. It is such an action word that I can think of nothing else but the War or worse yet a description of a unified movement, single-minded in purpose, to gain independence through various means of action.”97
93 Draft Interpretive Prospectus, 5.
94 Selby, "RevolutionaryAmerica," 6-7; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 82.
95 Burchill Revisions Letter on Interpretive Prospectus, 1985, Folder: Interpretive Prospectus - Notes, Comments, BNHPArchives, 1.
96 Swofford Memo on Interpretive Prospectus, 1985, Folder: Interpretive Prospectus - Notes, Comments, BNHP Archives, 1.
97 Swofford Memo on Interpretive Prospectus, 1.
In 1988, work began on a new exhibition in the Old State House that continued these themes and portrayed history through iconic heroes and villains, predominantly successful Boston merchants, businessmen, and politicians. Beyond including “ideas of intellectual and individual freedom and self-government” among its guiding themes, the exhibit was built from the extensive artifact collections of the Bostonian Society, including signs, advertisements, and maritime navigational devices from the late eighteenth century.98 The collections held portraits and engravings of Royal Governors, King George III, and familiar patriot figures, as well as various “artifacts illustrating everyday life,” which almost exclusively belonged to those wealthy figures and high-ranking Revolutionary military officers.99 The exhibit, later entitled From Colony to Commonwealth, was criticized as being centered around the heroics of “‘Leading Persons,’ John Hancock, James Otis, John Adams, and Samuel Adams, who confront Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of royal authority.”100 Young argued the exhibit was already outdated during the 1980s as it omitted a nuanced and diverse picture of Revolutionary Boston.101 Grey Osterud of the Bostonian Society would later agree, pointing out that the exhibit ignored “Boston’s revolutionary activity [by the commoners, which] was comparatively disorderly, involving crowd actions that were not always kept under control by the elite leaders in the Sons of Liberty.”102 Young noted that given the Bostonian Society’s holdings of artifacts relevant to Revolutionary radicalism, like the lantern and bunting hung from the Liberty Tree, the populist side of Boston’s movement for Independence could readily have been represented.103
98 Old State House Goody, Clancy, &Associates, Inc. Exhibit Draft, 1988, Folder: Old State House Exhibit (1988), BNHPArchives, 2.
99 Old State House Sands Exhibit Draft, 1988, Folder: Old State House Exhibit (1988), BNHPArchives, 3-4, 6.
100 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 24.
101 Young, 24.
102 Osterud Exhibit Revisions, June 2000, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives, 1-2.
103 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 24.
Another mark of outdated public history during the mid-to-late 1980s was the continued utilization of living history, meant to transport tourists back in time into a romanticized, colonial Boston thematically composed of focuses on heroic icons and ideological tensions of liberty and independence. The most explicit examples on the Freedom Trail of this interpretative style hailing from the Bicentennial-era were costumed interpretation, performances, and reenactments.
Charlestown Chief of Interpretation Bill Foley and others in the BNHP organized military reenactments throughout the 1980s, with eighteenth-century arms demonstrations at the Bunker Hill Monument and the Charlestown Navy Yard.104 While the public history movement would eventually professionalize many stakeholders in the Freedom Trail, living history would continue to be a popular tool among others invested in the Trail as an economic tool for tourism. A script developed by Boston’s Convention & Tourist Bureau on which the bureau anticipated NPS collaboration for their film and ranger-guided tour called “Discover Freedom!” exemplified an immersive representation with Longfellowian tropes.105 A draft sent to the BNHP dramatically told of the epic battles between enlightened, patriotic American-Bostonians and a tyrannical British Empire, unjustly asserting control from afar. The script was complete with shocking cutscenes, booming cannon fire, and brave colonists whose inalienable beliefs incited a revolution in the name of liberty, described as “men whose goal was not a place in history, but simply the salvation of common sense.”106 The tourism bureau’s film paid special attention to Paul Revere before and after the Revolution, seen “prosper[ing] as a businessman,” thus idolizing the iconic symbol of white, male entrepreneurship.107 BNHP curator Peter Steele tore
104 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 213, 217.
105 Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, May 20, 1988, Folder: Freedom Trail - Script +Annotations, BNHP Archives, 1.
106 Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, 2.
107 Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, 14.
into the script, scrawling across its cover sheet: “Bad Content. No Accuracy.”108 Steele and Park Historian Paul Weinbaum proceeded to enumerate misleading information in the script and various inaccuracies implying a solely ideological motivation behind the Revolution.109 In this situation, the notes of Weinbaum and other professional historians were again limited to matters of enforcing accuracy, rather than pushing to modernize historical themes in matters of interpretation by presenting complex narratives. The continued employment of such interpretive styles and historic themes during the late 1980s were backed and implemented by Superintendent John Burchill, who came to the BNHP in 1984 from the nearby Lowell National Historical Park. Burchill, who grew up in Boston’s West Roxbury, held degrees in business, not history, and had secured significant federal funding as superintendent at Lowell where he managed the park with an indifference to treating public communities as a stakeholder in historical public memory.110 Unlike his predecessor, swamped by logistics in the Navy Yard, Burchill managed the BNHP like a business and filled his slate with “luncheon meetings, press events, meetings of historical associations, book readings, and civic events,” and “joined and eventually led the board of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau.”111 During his tenure, the purpose of the BNHP became securing funding for preservation projects costing millions of dollars, expanding public awareness of NPS involvement in Boston, and managing the park itself rather than the intended function of working with partner sites to promote public history, which were eventually cut annual checks rather than receiving meaningful contributions toward interpretation, planning, and maintenance.112 The
108 Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, Cover Letter.
109 Weinbaum Note Freedom Trail Video Script, June 6, 1988, Folder: Freedom Trail - Script + Annotations, BNHP Archives; Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, 1.
110 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 200.
111 Bruggeman, 202-03.
112 Bruggeman, 203-04.
effects on interpretation and management of Burchill’s focus on profit over public history were exacerbated by his racial biases.113 Park historian Louis Hutchins, who held the position during the early 1990s, remembered that “Burchill was essentially a racist,” and shared stories with “very explicitly” racist descriptions of Black people from when Burchill lived in predominantly African American neighborhoods in South Boston.114 Burchill’s bigotry overtly influenced his administrative responsibilities as he was publicly dismissive of administrative staff at the Boston African American National Historic Site (BOAF), an extension of the BNHP associated with Boston’s Afro-American History Museum, and disapproved of their work.115
Public history in Boston during Burchill’s tenure before 1990 continued to interpret history within a narrow window of narrative and chronological significance. Burchill’s personal biases would further maintain a limited scope of commemoration, as public history in Boston contained little inclusion of Black history outside of the twentieth-century interpretation presented at the Beacon Hill Museum of Afro-American History, which maintained interpretive independence from the remainder of the Freedom Trail, because Burchill treated the BOAF as a separate entity.116 History portrayed by most Freedom Trail sites remained focused on the action in Boston leading up to the start of the War of Independence, culminating in the Battle of Bunker Hill, with infrequent acknowledgements of the ideological influences of the Puritans and limited interpretation of Boston’s twentieth century via the direct holdings of the NPS at the Charlestown Navy Yard.117 Only in the 1990s, would public history on and around the Freedom
113 Bruggeman, 211.
114 Bruggeman, 211.
115 Bruggeman, 211, 184.
116 Burchill Revisions Letter on Interpretive Prospectus, BNHPArchives, 11.
117 The Charlestown Navy Yard displays and produces historical interpretation for the U.S.S. Constitution, the U.S.S. Cassin Young, and the Navy Yard itself, a former center of shipbuilding and Navy operations; Tourist Bureau Freedom Trail Video Script, BNHPArchives; Draft Interpretive Prospectus, BNHPArchives, 3; Young, “Revolution in Boston?” 34-35.
Trail begin to address the legacy of the Revolution as it connected to a diverse, modern Boston, to desegregation and the Civil Rights movement in Boston, and to the historiographic trends of the late twentieth century.
Despite the eventual professionalization of Boston’s public history institutions, interpreters continued to face numerous challenges. In the BNHP itself, limitations on public historians were structural and financial. Budget austerity during Ronald Reagan’s presidency crippled the NPS, the BNHP included, putting further stress on staff and operations.118 Additionally, progressive staff were frequently at odds with Burchill’s administration and more conservative interpretive staff.119 When Weinbaum, who primarily spent his time between interpretation at the history-minded BOAF and preparing nominations for Boston historic sites into the National Register of Historic Places (in order to secure the funding granted to such member sites), found himself involved in interpretation on the Freedom Trail, his contributions were stifled. Weinbaum worked against complacent interpretive staff, resistant to substantial change, and focused on correcting matters of inaccuracy rather than incorporating meaningful themes into educational materials.120 Obstacles to Weinbaum’s involvement frustrated him and other public historians in the park, to the point where Weinbaum began writing an article for The Public Historian on “interpretive planning in the National Park Service and [how it] doesn’t keep up with changing historical interpretations in the academic world.”121 Furthermore, when Chief of Visitor Services Gerald Swofford sent revisions on the park’s interpretive prospectus to Chief of Interpretation Louis Venuto, Swofford noted that “all of us closely associated with the Park
118 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 192-93.
119 Bruggeman, 224.
120 Bruggeman, 130, 219-20; Weinbaum Paul Revere House Letter, December 6, 1983, Folder: Paul Revere House, BNHPArchives, 1-2.
121 Pitcaithley Letter to Lindsey Reed and The Public Historian journal, BNHPArchives.
have a feeling for this” understanding of history, highlighting the unfamiliarity among senior interpretive and administrative staff with the historical matters of a historical park.”122
Elsewhere, individual sites faced less involvement and assistance from the BNHP despite its structural model as a partnership park, and were left to independently address the challenges of balancing history, audiences, and financial solvency.123 Thus, much of interpretation during the late 1980s continued to lack quality historical analysis. In 2000, the Bostonian Society’s Osterud commented that the Old State House’s 1988 Colony to Commonwealth exhibit needed continuity, causal contextualization, and suffered from a myopic Boston-centric perspective: “The exhibition implicitly takes Boston as if it were typical of the Revolutionary movement and examines broader trends in the local setting.”124
Because the Freedom Trail’s partner sites are independently managed, however, a professionalized and progressive staff had the capabilities to produce accurate, significant, and complex public history on the American Revolution. Nina Zannieri’s Paul Revere Memorial Association did just that.
Themes were formulated that focused on domestic life, with women and children in more prominent roles, and these were incorporated into the site's interpretation. Tours, school programs, exhibits, and publications all encouraged visitors to think of the site as a “home” rather than a famous person’s “house, ” reflect[ing] the dynamic history of the North End as a neighborhood which served as home first to wealthy merchants, then to scores of artisans, and finally to waves of immigrants.125
122 Swofford Memo on Interpretive Prospectus, BNHPArchives, 2.
123 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 204-05.
124 Osterud Exhibit Revisions, BNHPArchives, 1.
125 Zannieri, "Report from," 47-48.
The Paul Revere House was an outlier among Freedom Trail sites with its early transformation into a modern, history-minded institution, publishing research on North End immigrant communities and, in 1989, changing its mission statement to include an expanded chronological focus, a dynamic Boston and North End, and an emphasis on “Revere’s life, work, and family” in its historical interpretation.126
“Why, our own John Adams Sam’s Cousin defended the British soldiers in court!”
Interpretation along the Freedom Trail between 1990 - 1995127
The early 1990s were a turning point in the public historiography of the Freedom Trail because history, for the first time, became a pivotal factor in interpretation. Exhibits were revisited and revised with new, critical themes, and broadened chronological periods.
Interpretation began to develop narrative complexity reflecting 1970s social history and the Freedom Trail started to acknowledge histories of gender and race in colonial Boston and sites engaged in academic research of their respective communities. The professionalization of public history institutions contributed to advancements in exhibitions, whether in the National Park Service or site-managing preservation societies, despite ongoing disagreements over priorities, perspectives, and profits within the Boston National Historical Park and throughout Boston.
With the involvement of historians in Boston’s historical spaces of memorial and commemoration, however, history became a touchstone in historical interpretation. The script for an Old State House orientation video, made in 1992 in partnership with the Bostonian Society and the NPS, exhibits the shift in a novel way. Bouncing back and forth between a narrator duo featuring a Romanticist and a Realist, the script takes viewers through the history of the Old
126 Zannieri, 48.
127 Old State House Video Draft Script, 1992, Folder: Old State House - Video, BNHPArchives, 9.
State House and its role in the development of the Revolution and eighteenth-century Boston.128 The Romanticist reflects the interpretive themes of Boston’s past, with the tendency to dwell on the educated and entrepreneurial white men whose ideologies sparked an inevitable revolution in a Longfellowian Boston.129 The Realist, however, represents a new voice in the representation of the past by clarifying romanticized tropes, sharing interesting, little-known facts, and providing background contextualizing the Old State House during the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.130 The Realist points out that the immortalized American patriots would have considered themselves British at the time and would “still admire the Redcoats [that protected them] during the French and Indian War.”131 The narrative structure lends complexity to the Romanticist’s ideological fixations, arguing that the Writs of Assistance were unpopular for economic reasons, because they hampered smuggling and thus renewed the tensions in colonial Boston.132 The dual nature of the film symbolized a turning point in public historiography in the early 1990s, balancing nostalgic and immersive Cold War histories and complex social histories. By providing engaging information rather than painting a vivid, simplified picture, the Realist replaced dramatic interpretive immersions with an accurate history, including a critical view of the Revolution’s origins and connections to colonial Boston’s legacy.
In 1994, the public history consulting organization American History Workshop (AHW) revisited Boston’s past interpretation in a review of the Old South Meeting House’s permanent exhibit.133 The independent organization spoke highly of the accuracy, being “based on excellent scholarship,” but described the exhibition as hyper-focused on patriotic ideas and values, myopic
128 Old State House Video Draft Script, 1.
129 Old State House Video Draft Script, 5.
130 Old State House Video Draft Script, 5-6.
131 Old State House Video Draft Script, 7.
132 Old State House Video Draft Script, 5-6.
133 American History Workshop (N.Y.), "Who WeAre,"American History Workshop, accessed January 19, 2024, https://www.americanhistoryworkshop.com/who-we-are/.
in Boston-centric understandings, and in need of “attention to the lives of ordinary people.”134 Furthermore, the AHW felt the exhibit could be improved from contextualizing Old South Meeting House in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and expanding on its contributions to American politics and free speech, which are major themes in the Meeting House’s historical significance.135 If the external evaluation of an exhibit’s quality failed to demonstrate that history had become a priority, then the actualization of those suggestions in the Old South Meeting House’s next permanent exhibit would, setting a new precedent for what was considered historically significant in interpretation.
Planning for the exhibition Voices of Protest began in 1994, with the eventual opening in 2000, with a “focus as single-mindedly as possible [on] the historical roots, present configurations, and future prospects of the freedom of speech.”136 Exhibit panels engaged audiences with thought-provoking questions tied to the significance of the American Revolution, asking “When liberty and order conflict, then what?” and “How far would you go to protest laws or government policies you disagreed with?”137 Plans included quotes and perspectives from John and Sam Adams and Ben Franklin, but also Abigail Adams, journeyman blacksmith Joshua Wyeth, and Betty Palmer, the wife of a hardware merchant and Boston Tea Party participant.138 Ultimately, the exhibit included statues of Phyllis Wheatley, as well as birth control activist Margaret Sanger, “presented dramatically with her mouth taped to protest efforts to ban her from speaking at Old South” and Mayor James Curley, “who prevented both Sanger and the Ku Klux
134 American History Workshop Evaluation Old South Meeting House Exhibit, 1994, Folder: Old South Meeting House Exhibition May '94, BNHP Archives, 6.
135 American History Workshop Evaluation Old South Meeting House Exhibit, 6-7.
136 Turino, Bower, and Kaufman, "Boston Museum," 80; Robert L. Hall Old South Meeting House Exhibit Comments, Folder: Old South, BNHPArchives, 1.
137 RalphAppelbaumAssociates Old South Meeting House Exhibition Draft Photocopy, November 21, 1995, Folder: Old South, BNHPArchives, 2-3.
138 Tea Party Model Old South Meeting House Exhibit, May 4, 1995, Folder: Old South, BNHPArchives, 1.
Klan from speaking at Old South” in the 1920s.139 The revised exhibit’s purpose was to prompt conversation on the legacy of the Old South Meeting House, the Revolution, and the freedom of speech in modern Boston and America, a more nuanced angle on ideology than had been taken along the Freedom Trail during the 1980s or before.140
A landmark aspect of the 1990s’ efforts toward reflecting contemporary academic histories in interpretation was the representation of historically marginalized perspectives, from the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, in public history. Along the Freedom Trail, the revisions to an exhibit in the Old State House reflects a newfound attention to these stories. The omission of the slave trade or the middle passage in the Bostonian Society’s trade map exhibit drew sharp criticism from the public, and was defaced with graffiti in protest, so the BNHP sought an external evaluation of the interpretation by historian Robert L. Hall.141 Hall recommended changes to the map, explaining that “New England was part of a web of economic interdependence that included Africa and the West Indies as well as continental Europe and the British Isles” and several Bostonians traded, transported, bought, and profited from the sale of enslaved people throughout the eighteenth century, including the exhibit’s Revolutionary period of focus.142 In 1993, park historian Louis Hutchins wrote that the new exhibit would incorporate Hall’s suggestions to include a graphic of a slave auction advertisement and to label the various regions, coasts, and colonial ports in West Africa involved in the slave trade, like the Ivory
139 Turino, Bower, and Kaufman, "Boston Museum," 82;Alexander Sanger, "Banned in Boston," Alexander Sanger (blog), entry posted January 31, 2022, accessed April 7, 2024, https://todayinclh.com/?event=margaret-sangerappears-gagged-in-boston.
140 RalphAppelbaumAssociates Old South Meeting House Exhibition Planning and Design Photocopy, October 27, 1995, Folder: Old South, BNHPArchives, 1-2.
141 Hutchins Memo Old State House Trade Map Exhibit, 1993, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives, 1.
142 Robert L. Hall Old State House Exhibit Evaluation, 1984, Folder: Old State House - Trade Map, BNHP Archives, 1, 5.
Coast, Gold Coast, Slave Coast, and Senegambia.143 By altering the map exhibit in order to include Boston’s slave trade in the Old State House, along with the representation of Crispus Attucks and Phyllis Wheatley, the Freedom Trail began to develop more complex interpretation by depicting a racially diverse colonial Boston.144 The early 1990s witnessed the integration of gender history in Boston’s Revolutionary public history. Although unaffiliated with the Freedom Trail, the Women’s Heritage Trail was founded in 1990 to commemorate the history and contributions of Bostonian women by a nonprofit organized by Boston public school teachers, librarians, and students.145 The trail’s guidebook, published in 1999, marked out five different trails in various neighborhoods, with interpretive materials on Boston’s history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century that parallel the wider chronological focus of public history during the 1990s.146 The downtown walk, entitled “The Search for Equal Rights,” was modeled after the established, popular Freedom Trail and followed the stories of notable female figures in the movements for religious freedom, abolitionism, and Native American rights. The Beacon Hill walk told stories about women’s contributions in the neighborhood as “Writers, Artists, and Activists” through sites including the home of Harriet Hayden, a station along the underground railroad.147 The creation of these new trails, along with the inclusion of women’s perspectives in interpretation elsewhere along the Freedom Trail, marked a new chapter in Boston’s Revolutionary interpretation.148 (See Fig. 4).
143 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 219; Robert L. Hall Old State House Exhibit Evaluation, BNHPArchives, 89; Hutchins Memo Old State House Trade Map Exhibit, BNHPArchives, 2-3.
144 Bloody Massacre on King Street Exhibit Draft, 1997, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives; American History Workshop Evaluation Old South Meeting House Exhibit, BNHPArchives, 6.
145 Mark Herlihy, "Pursuing History in the Hub:Assessing Heritage Trails in Boston," The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 75-76, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.73.
146 Herlihy, 75-76.
147 Herlihy, 75-76.
148 Tea Party Model Old South Meeting House Exhibit, BNHPArchives, 1.
In addition to reflecting academic history in their exhibits, Freedom Trail stakeholders began to participate in scholarship during the early 1990s, publishing research on the history of their communities and respective fields of specialty in public interpretation. A 1991 edition of The Revere House Gazette, a quarterly publication by the Paul Revere Memorial Association, included the article “Paul Revere, American Capitalist.”149 It was written by Alejandro Colas, “a graduate student in London who worked as an interpreter at the Revere House” during the
149 Alejandro Colas, Revere House Gazette Article, Winter 1991, Folder: Interpretive Prospectus - Notes, Comments, BNHPArchives, 1.
previous summer season, which highlights the degree to which professionalization shaped the historical work being done at the Association.150 Contextualizing Revere in the light of contemporary historical analysis, with a similar lens to Young’s critical socioeconomic study of George Robert Twelves Hewes, Colas points out that Revere’s trade and inherited silversmith shop made him highly respectable in Bostonian society.151 Colas contrasts Revere and Hewes, attributing Revere’s privileged status as a “Liberal Whig” during the Revolution to his relative financial success, rather than Hewes’ standing among the “radical[s] whose ranks were composed of laborers” and other common workers.152 “Paul Revere, American Capitalist” is an analysis of “the importance of class and politics in shaping the lives of many at a time,” a work of scholarship that speaks to the influence of professional academic and contemporary social history at the Paul Revere House.153 The Bostonian Society’s 1992-1994 exhibition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, entitled The Last Tenement: Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston’s West End, presented an exhibit in the Old State House and later published a book of the same name that “for the first time grappled with the fact and legacy of urban renewal in Boston.”
154 By contributing to and participating in historical scholarship in the early 1990s, the Bostonian Society took its first steps toward applying the authority of historical representation in the Old State House to critical stories of Boston’s twentieth century, whether urban renewal and community displacement or social desegregation and racial violence.
150 Alejandro Colas, Revere House Gazette Article, 1.
151 Colas, 1-2.
152 Colas, 1-2.
153 Colas, 1-2.
154 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 218.
In addition to the influence of the professional staff at individual Freedom Trail sites, whether from the Old South Meeting House, the Paul Revere House, or the Old State House, the public historians at the BNHP contributed to the development and modernization of complex historical interpretation in the early 1990s. The Romanticist and Realist film at the Old State House was made together by the NPS and the Bostonian Society, for which park exhibit specialist Judy Baumwoll recommended that the production connect Revolutionary freedoms to the twentieth century and represent a diverse colonial population.155 Louis Hutchins, the park historian during the early 1990s, suggested that the film acknowledge how rights and freedoms would gradually come to apply to women, minorities, and common citizens, and that the Realist address the radical populist side of the Revolution, which the Bostonian Society still hesitated to do.156 Martin Blatt, the historian at Lowell National Historical Park, contributed to the design of the Old South Meeting House’s Voices of Protest exhibit and worked to ensure that the interpretation avoided over-simplification in dealing with a historical theme as broad as free speech.157 Blatt wrote that while “American concepts of democracy are constantly evolving in a dynamic process of re-interpretation and expansion of civil liberties,” the exhibit may initially have misleadingly implied that “US history . . . [moves] on a continuum towards ever greater progress and human good.”158 Furthermore, the BNHP was involved in the revisions to the Old State House trade map exhibit, coordinating the evaluation by an outside scholar and afterwards making necessary edits to address colonial Boston’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.159
155 Old State House Video Draft Script, BNHPArchives, 1; Baumwoll Memo Old State House Video Draft, 1992, Folder: Old State House - Video, BNHPArchives, 1.
156 Hutchins Memo Old State House Video Draft, 1992, Folder: Old State House - Video, BNHPArchives, 1-4; Hull Memo Old State House Video Draft, 1992, Folder: Old State House - Video, BNHPArchives.
157 Blatt Memo on Old South Meeting House Exhibition,August 5, 1994, Folder: Old South, BNHPArchives, 1.
158 Blatt Memo on Old South Meeting House Exhibition, 1.
159 Hutchins Memo Old State House Trade Map Exhibit, BNHPArchives, 2-3.
While the BNHP expedited the thematic modernization of interpretation, the National Park Service was still far from a shared vision of public history, and any contributions toward exhibiting progressive histories are attributable to the work of the handful of professional historians at the park. Park historian Paul Weinbaum left in 1991 after a decade in Boston, having spent most of his time securing nominations for national preservation funding.160 When he sought to apply his research to interpretation, Weinbaum was stifled by narrow understandings of historical significance.161 He failed to develop interpretation on free speech at the Old South Meeting House in 1985, denied by NPS associates who “did not feel [the Freedom Trail] could tell that story extensively,” which was precisely what the 2000 exhibit Voices of Protest would ultimately do.162 So stark were the differences in visions for public history between Weinbaum and Burchill’s administration that when Hutchins took over as park historian, Burchill told him that “I don’t want you to be another Paul Weinbaum.”163 However, Hutchins would ultimately have a greater effect on incorporating complex histories into interpretation on the Freedom Trail, through exhibit designs, consulting for the 1995 BNHP report “The Freedom Trail: A Framework for the Future,” and “organiz[ing] seminars with interpretive staff to read and discuss recent scholarship concerning the social history of the Revolution.”164 Hutchins was another example of the public history movement bringing nuanced historical narratives to Boston, coming to the park with a masters in American History from University of California, Berkeley and having served as a public historian at the Smithsonian
160 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 219.
161 Bruggeman, 219-20.
162 Bruggeman, 219-20.
163 Bruggeman, 221.
164 Hutchins Memo Old State House Trade Map Exhibit, BNHPArchives, 2-3; Hutchins Memo Old State House Video Draft, BNHPArchives, 1-4; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 221-22.
Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Historic American Engineering Record.165
Hutchins and other progressive staff would continue to face resistance from BNHP administration, who were yet to value scholarly history when making public history. Taking a page from the priorities of early Freedom Trail stakeholders, many of Burchill’s efforts went into gathering public funding for major preservation projects.166 Working with John Joseph Moakley, United States House Representative for Massachusetts’ 9th District, Burchill secured $45 million in federal monies for preservation projects across the Freedom Trail at sites including Faneuil Hall, the Old South Meeting House, and the Old State House between 1986 and 1996.167 The newly restored Faneuil Hall soon held the colonial-styled Grasshopper Shops, which Burchill described as meant to return the hall to its “historic role as [a] marketplace” in what would symbolically continue the connection between tourist revenue and interpretive immersion in a romanticized eighteenth-century Boston.168 Working at the park, Hutchins found that “history was viewed by the leaders as the icing on the cake” or an afterthought, whereas he and other progressive staff intended “to work closely with interpretation; to make sure the stories they were telling were accurate, and engaging, and pushing the understanding of history beyond the old narrative.”169 When Hutchins tried to incorporate a discussion of school desegregation and 1970s racial tensions in Charlestown into a neighborhood walking tour, Navy Yard Chief of Interpretation Bill Foley “cut the whole thing down fast” to maintain his close relationships with
165 Bruggeman, 221.
166 Bruggeman, 203.
167 "MoakleyArchive & Institute," Suffolk University, accessed March 5, 2024, https://www.suffolk.edu/academics/libraries/moakley-archive-and-institute/about-joe-moakley.; Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, The Freedom, Foreward Letters.
168 The name “Grasshopper Shops” is a reference to the golden weathervane of a grasshopper atop Faneuil Hall; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 212.
169 Bruggeman, 221.
the Bunker Hill Monument Association, a conservative Charlestown preservation society.170
What would have been a significant attempt by the NPS to represent Boston’s history in the postwar twentieth century was blocked by a BNHP administration unwilling to have critical conversations about a history not designed for attracting tourists. The state of public history in Boston in the mid-1990s is best captured by the study “The Freedom Trail: Foundation for a Renewed Vision,” which balances a growing interest in conveying a critical social history and the entrenched perspective viewing the Trail as an eighteenth-century theme park. Produced by consultant firm Goody, Clancy, & Associates for the BNHP in 1995, the report examines the realities of the Trail’s historic landscape, economic significance, existing infrastructure, and interpretive opportunities.171 Section I, which contains a “remarkable awareness of the limitations of history making along the Freedom Trail,” acknowledges the Freedom Trail as . . . a child of the 1950s, reflecting the biases and programs of a post-war decade that emphasized outstanding heroes and events. . . . As we re-examine the Freedom Trail in the 1990s, the decade of multi-culturalism, it is clear that both the trail and the city have a much broader tale to tell, . . . capable of telling a much broader story of Boston and its various themes of freedom 172
In analyzing the potential for interpretation with available preserved historic sites, the study outlines opportunities to include themes of political, military, religious, social, economic, and intellectual freedom, and history, as well as Black, women’s, and immigration history on the
170 Bruggeman, 222.
171 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, The Freedom Trail Study for a Renewal Vision, Appendix, by David Dixon / Goody Clancy and Boston National Historical Park (Boston, 1995), Boston Public Library.
172 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 222; United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, The Freedom Trail Study I - 1-2.
existing Freedom Trail during and beyond the Revolutionary period, which “is only part of Boston’s history.”173
In its final sections, however, the study examines the Trail as a tourist destination and a means of profit. The author of the chapter “Interpretation and Its Uses” explains that . . . costumed dramatic interpreters, musical activities, ceremonial happenings, guided thematic walks are just some of the many programs and activities that Colonial Williamsburg successfully employs to provide visitors with understanding and pleasure during their visit.174
The proposed Longfellowian interpretive methods further highlight the focus on promoting tourism, as the study explains that “throughout the world of attractions from Las Vegas to the Metropolitan Museum, programming of this nature is ubiquitous,” suggesting these and other travel spots are models for Boston’s public history.175 While Hutchins and other progressive stakeholders made progress during the early 1990s toward producing richer, complex public history by incorporating contemporary social history into exhibits, interpretation, and the NPS’s 1995 study, other stakeholders’ focus on profit continued to push conservative histories onto the Trail.
“Does the meaning of a monument change along with the community that houses it?”
Public Stakeholders in Boston’s Public History during the 1990s176
Nina Zannieri summarized the realities of Boston’s public history making in 2003, when she wrote in The Public Historian that “for all intents and purposes, the Freedom Trail
173 United States Department of the Interior, I - Table of Contents, 41, 44-45.
174 United States Department of the Interior, VI - 13-14.
175 United States Department of the Interior, VI - 1, 13-14.
176 Sarah J. Purcell, "Commemoration, PublicArt, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument," The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 61, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.55.
experience is driven by the efforts and energies of key sites along the trail and the National Park Service, by the expectations of visitors, and by the observations and input of academic historians.”177 The influence of stakeholding institutions and academics was evident during this period as professionalization pushed public historians toward incorporating complex social histories into interpretation, but the “expectations of visitors,” particularly those of local Bostonians, would shift during the late 1990s as the final piece of the museological triangle evolved to further the interpretive development of the Freedom Trail.178
The visitors of the Freedom Trail, a category of public history stakeholders consisting of tourist travelers and local communities, came to influence commemoration as the public of Boston changed during the 1980s and 1990s. First, demographic shifts reshaped the identity and racial composition of Boston’s communities. Immigration, including “especially low-wage workers from Asia and Latin America” contributed to “Boston’s nonwhite population [having] grown 10 times and less than one-quarter of the city’s current residents [having] lived [in Boston] as recently as 1965.”
179 As a result, the population split between what was known as “old-stock Yankees” and Italian and Irish Catholic neighborhoods gave way to a multicultural “urban life . . . [that] created an opportunity for cooperative effort, and diminished the bicultural conflict that often got in the way of cultural development.”
180 The urban renewal and reinvestment of the 1950s produced economic results during the 1980s, as Boston’s white population grew and gentrified urban areas amidst the development of a “‘mind-based’ economy,” driven by an educated workforce skeptical of nationalistic, simplified histories.181
177 Zannieri, "Report from," 48.
178 Zannieri, 48.
179 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 191-92; Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 7.
180 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 8.
181 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 191-92, 215.
Economic shifts in the 1990s, along with improved spirits from Boston’s “powerful growth-phase” and the conclusion of the Central Artery Tunnel “Big Dig” highway project and landfill-built expansion of the Seaport District, contributed to new attitudes among the Freedom Trail’s stakeholding authorities toward Boston’s community.182 While still interested in attracting spending, shifts in Boston’s demographic composition prompted the means of investment for Burchill’s Boston National Historical Park administration and Mayor Thomas Menino’s city hall to change from promoting tourist attendance to promoting community involvement along the Freedom Trail.183 Menino and Burchill continued to deal with the Trail in “economic terms,” but the consideration of local publics as stakeholders in Boston’s public history had profound implications on how the city’s past was represented.184
While Bostonians had some part in shaping their public history, including the nineteenthcentury preservation of the Old State House and the 1990 creation of the Women’s Heritage Trail, the 1995 creation of the Freedom Trail task forces marked a new period for community stakeholders.185 The task forces, created after the recommendations in the 1995 Freedom Trail study released by the NPS, consisted of “representatives from the constituent sites, the tourism industry, the city, the NPS, . . . other private and public organizations,” and other individual citizens from various communities.186 The input and decisions of the task forces would come to shape the BNHP’s next major Freedom Trail report, the 1996 “The Freedom Trail: A Framework
182 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 7; MassDOT Highway Division, "The Big Dig: Project Background," Mass.gov, last modified 2024, accessedApril 7, 2024, https://www.mass.gov/info-details/thebig-dig-project-background.
183 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 9; Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, The Freedom Trail - A Framework for the Future, by David Dixon and Goody Clancy (Boston: National Park Service, 1996), 5, https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/reference/profile/2190259.
184 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 216.
185 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 21; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 216.
186 Bruggeman, 216.
for the Future,” which would lay the groundwork for historical interpretation for the rest of the decade.
Outside the scope of existing public history institutions, Bostonians gathered to form new organizations to shape how their city’s past was enshrined. In 1996, historian Bob Krim, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, began conversations with public history stakeholders in Boston and wrote an article in The Boston Globe entitled “Making Boston an Historic Place to Visit.”187 The article, which urged public and private investment in the Freedom Trail and Boston’s cultural and historical heritage to promote tourism, sparked responses from Pat Moscaritolo and Gary Countryman, head of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and CEO of the Liberty Mutual Group Insurance company, respectively, who were already major private investors in Boston’s heritage economy.188 The coalition grew to include the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Revolution historian David Hackett Fischer, Freedom Trail site directors, local industry executives, Boston Redevelopment Authority developers, and several university historians on its very active Board of Directors and various advisory committees.189 The organization that by 1999 would be known as the Boston History Collaborative (BHC) became a “broad alliance of institutions and individuals in many sectors of the city’s life,” bringing together public historians and leaders of institutional stakeholders with new voices in interpretation.190
In its 1998 report entitled “Boston’s Rich History & Visitor Potential” and its 1999 presentation to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the BHC laid out proposals to create four
187 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 9.
188 Bob Krim The Boston Globe Article Photocopy, December 28, 1996, Folder: The History Collab, BNHP Archives; Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 9.
189 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 11-12.
190 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 1-2.
additional heritage trails and resources.191 Plans included creating a literary trail, an immigration and family history program, a maritime history trail (along a water route), an innovation trail, a centralized Boston visitor center and museum, and to promote preservation projects representing Boston’s seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.192 The BHC laid out plans to “collaborate with the NPS and the Museum [of Afro-American History] and to support” them in non-financial means to expand the existing Black Heritage to include sites in Cambridge and other Boston neighborhoods, as well as in other general interpretive and preservation efforts.193
Through the BHC and other organizations, Bostonians previously uninvolved in the heritage industry contributed to broadening their city’s public history landscape by depicting a richer tradition along an expanded window of chronological significance.194
Commonly referred to as the “Athens of America,” Boston is unique for the relative concentration of leading academics and historians in its communities. Academic history was a theoretical stakeholder in 1990s public history as something interpretation should aspire to reflect, but it was also represented by members of the public from Boston’s leading universities and research institutions whose perspectives and involvement during the 1990s contributed to critical representations of the past. Historian involvement became central in the BHC and along the Freedom Trail, including the 2000 Old South Meeting House exhibition Voices of Protest and in a seminar on the Boston Massacre for public historians and academics hosted by social
191 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 12; Future of Boston's Past Report, May 1, 1998, Folder: The History Collab, BNHPArchives, 1-3.
192 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 12; Future of Boston's Past Report, 1-3.
193 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, 14; Future of Boston's Past Report, 2.
194 Further community involvement refers to the Women’s Heritage Trail organization and the Friends of City Square Park, a Charlestown preservation society whose member Carl Zellner found the site of Paul Revere’s landing in Charlestown, which was subsequently added to the Freedom Trail with a wayside marker; Friends of the City Square Park Publication, Spring 1999, Folder: Friends of City Sq. Park - Revere's Landing Wayside, BNHP Archives, 1, 3; Paul Revere's Landing Wayside Design, Folder: Friends of City Sq. Park - Revere's Landing Wayside, BNHPArchives.
historian and political activist Howard Zinn.195 Young, the Revolutionary historian whose seminal works on class and radicalism helped to advance academic understandings of the colonial era during the 1970s’ focus on social history, was outspoken among these historians. In 1997, Young was involved in the Old State House’s exhibit “The Boston Massacre,” ensuring that the interpretation would focus on the “man in the street” or “the lower rungs of society,” while exploring questions about public memory of the Massacre, the values expressed in the conflict, and the event’s legacy in shaping the revolution and attitudes toward civil disobedience ever since.196 Young voiced the need for class representation in Boston’s Revolutionary public history, making the argument in his 1999 book The Shoemaker and The Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution and in his 2003 The Public Historian article “Revolution in Boston? Eight Propositions for Public History on the Freedom Trail.”197
The explosion of community involvement with the Freedom Trail and Boston’s public history represented the interests of intellectuals, executives, and public organizations, but also the experiences of Boston’s other citizens, including marginalized groups. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s public artwork involving the Bunker Hill Monument represented the perspectives of the community of Charlestown surrounding the obelisk:
Wodiczko repeatedly projected a sixteen-minute videotape onto the 221-foot high obelisk, which seemed to come to life with the huge faces and voices of Charlestown
195 Voices of Protest included contributions from Pauline Mayer of MIT and Robert L. Hall of Northeastern University; Northeastern University, "Robert Hall," College of Social Sciences and Humanities, accessed April 9, 2024, https://cssh.northeastern.edu/faculty/robert-hall/; Letter from Blatt to Zinn, January 26, 1998, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives; "Howard Zinn Dies," BU Today (Boston), January 28, 2010, [Page #], accessed April 7, 2024, https://www.bu.edu/articles/2010/howard-zinn-dies/.
196 Bloody Massacre on King Street Exhibit Draft, BNHPArchives, 1-3; Letter from Young to Hill, October 24, 1997, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives, 1-2; Letter from Young to Hill II, November 3, 1997, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives, 1; Letter from Young to Hill III, December 5, 1997, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives, 1.
197 Michael Kenney The Boston Globe Article Photocopy,August 5, 1999, Folder:Al Young, BNHPArchives; Young, "Revolution in Boston?"
residents as they told grueling personal stories about their murdered children and siblings.
The Bunker Hill monument, designed to remind all who saw it of the violent sacrifice of American lives in the Revolutionary War, now took on an added dimension, as it seemed to speak of sacrifice within the more recent context of urban violence and murder. Wodiczko projected the faces and hands of Charlestown residents, the mothers, and brothers of murdered young men, onto the face of the monument, as loudspeakers played their voices, so that the obelisk seemed to have a talking head atop its high granite structure. . . .
One mother, Sandy, blinked back tears as she said “When Jay was murdered it was the murder that was heard round the world. I will never stop, never. ”
Another mother in the projection, Pam, said that the murder of her son had made her rethink “freedom and how I took it for granted, [it] was earned by other people and I just always expected it to be here.”198
The installation, projected nightly from September 24 to 26, 1998, was a collaboration between the Charlestown After Murder Program, “a support group for victims of violence founded by local mothers who had lost their children to violence,” and Krzysztof Wodiczko, an MIT and Harvard faculty member whose past work is “most famous for transforming the meaning of public buildings and structures in a way that challenges both his viewers and the meaning of public space.”199 Charlestown, a working-class city that functions as a neighborhood of the immediate Boston metropolitan area, struggled with gang activity and disproportionately high murder and violence rates, with an unspoken “code of silence” that left 74 percent of
198 Purcell, "Commemoration, Public," 56.
199 Purcell, 59; Krzysztof Wodiczko, "Projections - Bunker Hill," Krzysztof Wodiczko, last modified September 1998, accessed March 17, 2024, https://www.krzysztofwodiczko.com/public-projections#/bunker-hill/.
homicides between 1975 and 1996 unsolved.200 By referencing the shot heard ‘round the world, the freedoms expected and experienced by Americans, and other Revolutionary imagery, the projection subverted the commemoration of the Bunker Hill Monument, whose significance became malleable rather than set, as monuments are built to appear.201 (See Fig. 4).
4. Photograph of Bunker Hill Monument during Krzysztof Wodiczko's Charlestown Projection Installation, September 1998.
200 Purcell, "Commemoration, Public," 58; Wodiczko, “Projections - Bunker," Krzysztof Wodiczko.
201 Purcell, "Commemoration, Public," 60, 69
The involvement of Boston’s disenfranchised communities in the making of public history sparked a groundbreaking installation that addressed the twentieth-century stories of Bostonians previously untold along the Freedom Trail. Ultimately, the project initiated a partnership between the BNHP and the Institute of Contemporary Art to maintain an artists-in-residence program called “Let Freedom Ring” that produced murals and other contemporary, artistic interpretation to the Freedom Trail and other historical sites: a chain reaction spreading innovative, modern exhibitions of public history.202
“A struggle for social justice and unity between Blacks and whites:”
Interpretation along the Freedom Trail between 1996 - 2000203
Building on the momentum of emerging critical interpretation from the early 1990s, an influx of community participation in public memory-making furthered the reinvention of interpretation on the Freedom Trail. Although the downpour of preservation funding reinforced the significance of public history to Boston’s economy going forward, the Trail’s means of attracting the public became portrayals of complex, multi-faceted, and inclusive histories through other styles of visitor engagement. The trends in Boston’s evolving heritage commemoration continued to face opposition, however, particularly from John Burchill’s Boston National Historical Park administration, and the Trail ultimately failed to live up to its greatest aspirations to synthesize interpretation despite proposals throughout the community.
The 1996 National Park Service report “The Freedom Trail: A Framework for the Future,” a public-facing plan based on the findings of the 1995 “The Freedom Trail: Foundation for a Renewed Vision” study, represents the general attitude among Boston’s historical institutions at the time that history, which is still meant to turn a profit, is best shared through a
202 Purcell, 60; Blatt, "Boston's Public," 14.
203 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 223.
variety of perspectives and themes.204 The report defines the significance of the Trail’s sites in familiar and new terms, referring to the Revolution of “minds and hearts,” the great debates and protests, the courageous acts of individuals like Paul Revere, the surge of battle at Bunker Hill; [and] the evolution of freedom in the early republic . . . [whose] actors included men and women of many races, social classes, and cultural backgrounds.205
While the report continues to view the colonial era through an ideological lens and a focus on its iconic heroes, its vision for interpretation balances a novel understanding of the Revolution’s context and legacy, along with the many walks of eighteenth-century life from which ordinary individuals contributed to Boston’s movement for independence.
Most notable among the report’s recommendations is the proposal to convert the decentralized Freedom Trail’s historical interpretation into a cohesive narrative, broken into four chapters.206 The first, examining the orthodox story of the “Revolution of Minds and Hearts,” dealt with the classic, elite patriot characters and their notions of freedom along the first of the Trail’s stops.207 The second, labeled the central stretch of downtown as “The People Revolt,” devoted the Boston’s landmark sites to the stories of everyday colonists involved in the Revolution whose lives had rarely been remembered.208 The third chapter, the “Neighborhood of Revolution,” addressed the contributions of patriots specific to Boston’s North End, including the iconic figures Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin and the neighborhood’s “sizable African American community.”209 The interpretive framework is notable for Burchill’s BNHP, having
204 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, The Freedom, Foreward Letters.
205 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 2.
206 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 11.
207 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 12.
208 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 12.
209 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 13.
incorporated numerous dimensions from contemporary academics’ social histories and proposed novel methods to present and remember the history. The report included traditional and innovative proposals, with expanded costumed interpretation and increased resources for museum interpretation by partner sites, but also including a new rental program for self-guided audio-wand tours in different languages and a “sound and light spectacle at the Charlestown Navy Yard” in the summer season.210 The 1996 “Framework for the Future” report marked a new direction for interpretation in the NPS, intending to bring old and new narratives to visitors through old and new means.
Although the plans for interpretation coming from the NPS were designed with history in mind, economics and profit remained the justification behind heritage preservation. Functionally, the 1995 study and 1996 report from the BNHP had the dual purposes of encouraging private donors to join in the flood of economic reinvestment via historical tourism infrastructure, and focusing and directing the interpretive vision of the Freedom Trail as a new wave of funding rebuilt the Trail.211 The federal monies pouring into Boston’s heritage industry came from U.S.
Representatives Chester Atkins and, particularly, John Joseph “Joe” Moakley of Massachusetts, who had long been an economic ally of the Trail, earmarking over $45 million for preservation projects since 1987.212 Prompting the reports was the funding from Mayor Thomas Menino’s city hall, including $15 million in general maintenance and development in Boston’s downtown and matching up to $500,000 of private contributions to the Freedom Trail as part of Menino’s
210 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 19, 21.
211 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, Foreward Letters; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 216-17.
212 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, Foreward Letters; Bruggeman, 210-11; Suffolk University, "MoakleyArchive," Suffolk University.
platform for investing in Boston’s communities.213 The 1996 “Framework for the Future” report attributed the need for cash to economic reasons, including a decline in the Trail’s visitor popularity when compared to other national attractions, looming threats for funding historical education programs and preservation, and a stagnant downtown tourism industry 214 Although parts of Boston’s historical stakeholders remained focused on bottom lines, the late 1990s were a time of remarkable interpretive innovation based on rich narratives of the city’s history. The Paul Revere House, which had already committed itself to engaging in scholarly research and modern historical interpretation during the 1980s, focused “equal attention . . . to how the story is shared to ‘the presentation,’” developing a variety of new materials and programs including “walking tours, lectures, school and after-school programs, exhibits, web sites, living history presentations, publications, research fellowships, teacher workshops, . . . concerts,” and other partnerships with museums and academic institutions.215 The Revere House’s initiatives painted stories of those who had been excluded from narratives told on the Freedom Trail previously, including “African Americans, women, and children during the Revolution, . . . [and] various immigrant groups that made the North End their home,” and addressed narratives outside the Revolutionary era, including the Pilgrim settling (in a partnership with Plymouth Plantation) and the Civil War period.216 In 1997, The USS Constitution Museum released a comprehensive class curriculum materials package called All Hands on Deck on the history and people behind the Charlestown Navy Yard’s crown jewel.217 The Boston History Collaborative’s heritage trails and other stops along the Freedom Trail
213 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, Foreward Letters; Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 9; Boston University, "Thomas Menino," BU Initiative on Cities, accessed January 9, 2024, https://www.bu.edu/ioc/who-we-are/thomas-menino/.
214 Boston National Historical Park United States Department of the Interior, 5.
215 Zannieri, "Report from," 49.
216 Zannieri, 53.
217 Turino, Bower, and Kaufman, "Boston Museum," 86.
participated in the interpretive renaissance, with visitation on the Freedom Trail rising from the newly released “Hit the Trail!” Passport, a program to promote consistent attendance across the Freedom Trail’s various sites proposed in the 1995 NPS Freedom Trail study.218
A critical piece of the inclusion of historical narratives originating from academic social history was the role of radicalism in the larger popular movement for independence in colonial Boston. The Old State House exhibit produced in collaboration with Young, the Bostonian Society, and the NPS explored Bostonian populism and its legacy, examining the perspectives of the men and women “in the street” who were often ignored or dismissed.219 John Adams’ label of “A rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs” became the title of an exhibit chapter on the people of the Boston Massacre.220 When the Bostonian Society returned loaned artifacts back to the Massachusetts Historical Society, revisions made to the “From Colony to Commonwealth” exhibit in 2000 magnified the interpretive focus on the theme of radicalism, as the Society and the NPS worked to contextualize Boston’s early pro-independence attitude and “history of direct, often disorderly popular action.”221 Ultimately, this would manifest itself in an new exhibition panel entitled “Popular Leaders of the Revolutionary Crowd,” covering a “cast of characters [that] would show the roles that common people played” including George Robert Twelves Hewes, Crispus Attucks, and Ebenezer McIntosh, the leader of a Liberty Tree Mob from Boston’s South End.222
The trends in the Freedom Trail’s historical interpretation spread to Boston’s broader public history landscape during the late 1990s, including a diverse cast of Revolutionary actors
218 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 16; Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 216.
219 Letter from Young to Hill, BNHPArchives, 1-2; Bloody Massacre on King Street Exhibit Draft, BNHP Archives, 2-3.
220 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 25, Bloody Massacre on King Street Exhibit Draft, 2.
221 Osterud Letter, September 12, 2000, Folder: Bostonian Soc. - Dated, BNHPArchives; Osterud Exhibit Revisions, BNHPArchives, 1-2.
222 Osterud Exhibit Revisions, 1-2.
and a chronologically-expanded view of history to address. During the centennial rededication of Augustus Saint-Gauden’s monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the Black Massachusetts 54th Regiment in 1997, BNHP historian Martin Blatt and other planners intentionally “did not discount the role of white abolitionist Boston but chose not to emphasize it, and hence the centennial became a salute by Boston and the nation to the centrality of the black role in the Civil War.”223 The Boston History Collaboration’s Literary Trail, opened on March 4, 1998, guided visitors through the history of Massachusetts literary movements “rang[ing] from transcendentalism and abolitionism to women’s rights and spiritual enlightenment.”224 After Martin Blatt was interviewed on local news network FOX 25 in 2000, discussing the inconsistent training and historical accuracy of heritage interpretation through guided and trolley tours, a number of trolley companies contacted and shared their scripts with Blatt and the BNHP to be reviewed by NPS Rangers and interpretive staff for historical accuracy and content.225
The developments in Boston’s public history in the late 1990s continued to be shaped by conflicting interpretive approaches behind the scenes, particularly in the NPS, and the Freedom Trail’s momentum going into the twenty-first century ultimately failed to achieve some of its stakeholders’ aspirations. After park historian Louis Hutchins left the service amidst tensions with a conservative park superintendent and administration, Martin Blatt joined the BNHP as its historian in 1996, having held the same position at nearby Lowell National Historical Park.226 A park historian with a Ph.D. in the histories of labor and political radicalism, Blatt continued to champion quality interpretation and social histories in projects across the Freedom Trail in spite
223 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 223; Blatt, "Boston's Public," 13.
224 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 12; Herlihy, "Pursuing History," 74-75.
225 Blatt Letter to Phaneuf, December 14, 2000, Folder: Fox 25, BNHPArchives, 1; Blatt Trolley Email Photocopy, July 28, 2000, Folder: Fox 25, BNHPArchives.
226 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 222.
of ideological standoffs with Superintendent Burchill.227 In one such encounter, after Blatt failed to invite Burchill to offer remarks alongside scheduled speakers Colin Powell and Museum of Afro-American History founder Byron Rushing at the monument rededication of the Black 54th Regiment, Burchill yelled at Blatt “Who the fuck do you work for Do you work for Rushing, or do you work for me!?”228 The BNHP administration, including Burchill and Charlestown Director of Interpretation Bill Foley, supported the president of the Bunker Hill Association, a Charlestown historical society, and a prominent Charlestown real estate broker in their public brawls with the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art over Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Bunker Hill projections, who criticized the groundbreaking adaptation of the memorial for “airing the town’s dirty laundry on a loft public monument.”229 Throughout his tenure at the BNHP, Burchill resisted the shifts along the Freedom Trail and within the functions of his own park interpretation he felt “complicated patriotic narratives of American progress.”230
Whether because of the influence of Burchill, or of other conservative stakeholding institutions, or because the Trail lacked the framework or centralized authority to implement certain changes, the Freedom Trail fell short of some of its most significant dreams. Many of these plans came from the audacious “Freedom Trail: Framework for the Future” report, which Young lamented, “gathers dust.”231 The strong, centralized partnership of Boston’s public history organizations never formed, the BNHP and Trail sites still struggle under limited budgets for exhibits, preservation, and marketing, and above all, the proposed visitor center never materialized.232 A downtown visitor and orientation center for the Freedom Trail and other
227 Bruggeman, 222.
228 Bruggeman, 224.
229 Bruggeman, 224; Purcell, "Commemoration, Public," 67.
230 Bruggeman, 224.
231 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 18.
232 Blatt Letter to Young, March 22, 2004, Folder: Fr. Tr. Foundation., BNHPArchives.
public history attractions was proposed by the Boston History Collaborative, the NPS, and other organizations in the late 1990s to synthesize scattered historical interpretations into a cohesive, progressive story, but instead the first floor of Faneuil Hall was converted into a shrunken public information center.233 Despite the interpretive advancements of the 1990s, academic historians continued to note the Freedom Trail’s meaningful opportunities for improvement. Young observed that the Trail lacked representation of colonial interaction with indigenous Native Americans, that the individual focus on gender and racial history “risk[s] fragmenting the history of the Revolution,” and that “if we avoid telling the dark side of the Revolution, we are at risk of falling into an exclusively celebratory history.”234 Despite the professionalization and historical prioritization in Boston’s colonial interpretation, the Freedom Trail failed to meet many of the intended and expected developments of its institutional and academic stakeholders. “It is not Disneyland.”235
Whereas many historical institutions and museums experienced a “paradigm shift” in their identities and purposes, “from collection-driven institutions to visitor centered museums” during the late twentieth century, the complicated web of Revolutionary history-makers and public memory designers in Boston does not align with such a model.236 Rather than historical institutions grappling with the feedback of communities, Boston’s public history stakeholders originated from the ties between tourism and patriotic heritage but, by 2000, had learned to commemorate the city’s rich and storied past in a manner that aligned with academic historical understanding. Although it took twenty years for the Freedom Trail to incorporate the social history of the 1970s, it did so thanks to the public history movement, which brought trained
233 Boston History Collaborative Presentation, BNHPArchives, 14; Blatt Letter to Young.
234 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 36-37.
235 Young, 41.
236 Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism, 21.
historians into the staffs of historical associations and agencies, and the reactions of neighboring communities, sparking a wave of fresh, engaging interpretive methods. The Trail did so, despite the structural involvement of organizations like Boston City Hall, the Freedom Trail Commission, and the Chamber of Commerce, who were solely interested in developing a downtown with charm and cleanliness for tourists.
The evolution of history’s commemoration in Boston is meaningful for the nation as a whole, which has long “sought positive association with these historical narratives” and for the very citizens of Charlestown, Cambridge, the North End, the Back Bay, the Waterfront, and South Boston who live amongst the monuments and memorials.237 Of his Bunker Hill Monument projection, Krzysztof Wodiczko noted that “on-lookers project their own ideas and thoughts onto the monument every day.”238 The legacy of the Revolution has been involved in Boston’s identity and the lives of its citizens since the nineteenth century, when Black, Irish, and Female Bostonians traced genealogical connections to Revolutionary Boston families to give authority to their efforts for equality, which wealthy white Bostonians undermined by trying to disprove in kind.239 Efforts to establish the Dorchester Heights National Historic Site in the 1930s, the first involvement of the National Park Service in Boston’s historical landscape, were driven by the desire of South Bostonians to tie Irish identity and ancestry with the American Revolutionary tradition.240
Just as the study of history is never complete, there is no exact translation of the narratives and themes of academic history into exhibits of public history, ready to be enjoyed by attentive audiences. Nor is such a model ideal, as no perfect framework exists in the fraught
237 Bergman, 20.
238 Purcell, "Commemoration, Public," 69.
239 Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom, 29.
240 Bruggeman, 37-38.
relationships of economics, academics, and publics that shape museums. Progress was made along the Freedom Trail, as the quality and substance of historical interpretation deepened during the 1990s, yet disparities in the evolution remain. Not every tale of Paul Revere told during the period cited its sources, with the most apparent examples remaining of Longfellowian interpretation in the 1990s being the ever-popular reenactments and guided walking, trolley, and bus tours.241 Additionally, this paper primarily focuses on Freedom Trail sites involved with the BNHP, though representing the bulk of historical interpretation at the time, simply because of the availability of resources and records chronicling their exhibitions and visitor materials. While the Old North Church prioritizes modern-day worship over historic commemoration, it nonetheless displayed permanent exhibitions and artifacts during the tenure of BNHP superintendent John Burchill that are not examined here. Shortcomings notwithstanding, the advancements in public history made by the Freedom Trail and the institutional ecosystem behind it are neither permanent nor inevitably enduring. Public historiographer Seth Bruggeman notes that since the progression of the 1990s, the work of progressive NPS staff has faced a roller-coaster of significant challenges, including overwhelming bureaucracy, starved budgets, and the terrifying crises of September 11, 2001 and the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013.242
Alfred Young once commented that “as the city all around booms with one redevelopment after another, the Trail retains its historical integrity, resisting thus far the pressures of tourism to sanitize history. It is not Disneyland.”243 However, the Freedom Trail earned historical integrity, rather than retaining it, as the Trail had none to begin with when it was hobbled together in 1951. It was between 1984 and 2000, amidst the tenure of the ultra-
241 Bruggeman, 217.
242 Bruggeman, 229.
243 Young, "Revolution in Boston?" 41.
conservative Boston National Historical Park superintendent John Burchill, that the Freedom Trail began to teach audiences about a complex, rich, and critical history of the Sons of Liberty, the Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere’s midnight ride.
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