Boston's Public History
Source: The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 11-16
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public History
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Boston’s Public History
MARTIN B LATT
B OSTON , PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY OTHER PLACE IN THE NATION , is the venue
where America invented itself. That heritage, writes James Carroll, “has put
a special burden on subsequent generations of Bostonians to be part of the
constant reinvention that history requires of this country. It is a burden we
have not always carried gracefully.”1
For example, the goals of the American Revolution, defined to a significant extent in Boston, included liberty, equality, and the claim that all
should have a voice. These ideas brought continuing struggles to Boston and
the nation over politics, economy, and culture. In a sense, the legacy of the
Revolution lies in the struggle itself, in the open-ended nature of its concept
of liberty. The issues of the Revolution have been contested throughout
American history and remain alive to this day. This notion flies in the face of
many in the Boston tourism industry who choose to celebrate uncritically
the realization of liberty in eighteenth-century Boston. However, the story
of American freedom, if told accurately and honestly, does not begin and
MARTIN BLATT has worked as chief of cultural resources/historian at Boston National Historical Park since 1996 and previously held the position of chief of professional services/
historian at Lowell National Historical Park, 1990–1996. A former member of the editorial
board of The Public Historian, Blatt most recently published the essay, “Holocaust Remembrance and Heidelberg” (The Public Historian 24, no. 4, Fall 2002, 81–96). Blatt’s books
include Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54 th Massachusetts Regiment (University of Massachusetts Press). His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications. Blatt has served in elected positions in the National Council on Public History and
the Organization of American Historians.
1. James Carroll, “Foreword,” to Susan Wilson, Boston Sites and Insights: A Multicultural
Guide to Fifty Historic Landmarks in and around Boston (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xiii–
xiv.
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The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 11–16 (Spring 2003). ISSN: 0272-3433
© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California and the
National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of
California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
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THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN
end with the glory of the Revolution. It is a story with far more complexity
and uncertainty.2
One of the special charms of Boston, as outlined in Boston National
Historical Park’s handbook, has always been its wealth of vibrant and active
historic sites, especially those related to the period of the American Revolution. Although a few other American cities can trace their origins as far back
as Boston, most have bulldozed and built over their historic structures, or
lost their original buildings to fire and other misfortunes.
Although Boston has lost the overwhelming majority of its historic
structures, in the 1870s, partly in anticipation and appreciation of the 1876
United States Centennial, Bostonians did save some buildings linked to
America’s rebellious past. A century later, in 1974, Congress and the
National Park Service (NPS) sought to ensure the continuity of this effort—
and the preservation of important parts of American’s heritage—by creating
Boston National Historical Park (BNHP). The park has proved vital in
helping to link, interpret, and preserve nationally prominent historic places
throughout Boston.
Today, the park is an association of sites ranging from steepled churches,
Revolutionary-period graveyards, and grand meeting halls to quaint colonial
homes, shops, battlegrounds, and America’s oldest commissioned warship.
With its elements scattered throughout the city, the park mixes historic
buildings and landscapes owned by the city, the state, the federal government, and a variety of private organizations. BNHP is a partnership park.
The success of the park is predicated upon a close working relationship with
the park’s partners.3 Those partners include the most active sites along
Boston’s Freedom Trail: Old South Meeting House, The Bostonian Society
(housed in the Old State House), the Paul Revere House, Old North
Church, and the USS Constitution Museum. The Freedom Trail, established in 1951 and revised over the intervening years, is Boston’s most
important and best-known public history venue.
Because of the centrality of the Freedom Trail to Boston, two of the
essays here focus on the trail. Alfred Young, the author of the lead essay,
“Revolution in Boston? Eight Propositions and Pitfalls for Public History on
2. Boston and the American Revolution, Official National Park Handbook (Washington,
D.C.: National Park Service, 1998); for an account of American freedom that is nuanced and
nonlinear, see Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1998).
3. Named in the enabling legislation for BNHP are the following: Old South Meeting House,
Old State House, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere House, Old North Church, Bunker Hill Monument, and USS Constitution in Charlestown Navy Yard. As amended, the park further came to
include Dorchester Heights Monument in South Boston. The park owns only Dorchester
Heights Monument, Bunker Hill Monument, and a portion of the historic Charlestown Navy
Yard.
As Chief of Cultural Resources/Historian for Boston National Historical Park, I play a key
role for the National Park Service in developing and carrying out the agency’s public history
agenda in Boston. Hence, I have had a hand, in one way or another, in many of the public
history projects described in this special section.
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BOSTON’S PUBLIC HISTORY
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the Freedom Trail,” has collaborated with the NPS on a variety of public
history projects in Boston. His essay is a thoroughly revised version of a talk
that he delivered at a conference organized by the NPS and others in Boston
in 2000, “Changing Meanings of Freedom: The 225th Anniversary of the
American Revolution.” Young is one of the few truly gifted scholars who has
produced an outstanding body of scholarship and who comprehends and
fully engages with public history practice with rigor and excellence.
Young’s concluding proposition in his essay speaks to the future of the
Freedom Trail. The trail, which covers 2.5 miles, does not have a single,
clearly defined identity. Young cites the 1995–96 report on the Freedom
Trail commissioned by the NPS which called for developing “a richer, more
evocative telling of the story [of the Revolution] which weaves the Sites and
Trail together.” It is possible, and certainly desirable, for this aim to be
accomplished, but it would require strong leadership from the historic sites
along the trail and the NPS within the framework of “a renewed organizational structure” for the trail called for by the report. Young questions why
the study has not been more aggressively implemented.
Although public history in Boston is understandably grounded in the
American Revolution, many other important and nationally significant
public history organizations and projects have a different focus. Beth
Bower’s review focuses on new exhibits at one such venue, the Museum of
Afro-American History. The museum works in partnership with Boston
African American National Historic Site, which is administered by BNHP.
The focus of the museum and the NPS is the free African-American
community on Beacon Hill in nineteenth-century Boston.
A joint project is the Black Heritage Trail, a walking tour that begins at
the monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment
(dramatized in the movie Glory). Alfred Young argues in his essay that this
statue and those statues in Boston to noted local abolitionists can “displace
the issue of slavery onto the South and hinder the city from acknowledging
its own history of slavery.” This is a valid point, but in 1997 the NPS and
others successfully employed the centennial celebration of the Shaw/54th
Monument to focus on the black enlisted men rather than their white
officers. We 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.4
Young’s essay discusses the Black Heritage Trail and others in a proposition where he speculates that Boston, in dealing with race and gender, may
be “at risk of fragmenting the history of the Revolution, in a sense of
resegregating American history.” There are ways in which the Black Heritage Trail works well in its relative isolation from the Freedom Trail (the two
trails do physically intersect at the Shaw/54th Monument on Boston Com4. See Martin Blatt, Thomas Brown, and Donald Yacovone, Hope & Glory: Essays on the
Legacy of the 54 th Massachusetts Regiment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
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mon). The Black Heritage Trail history at least is not subsumed by the more
“famous” stories of the Freedom Trail. However, the location of the Black
Heritage Trail on Boston’s Beacon Hill, a fairly wealthy, largely white
community, has made it difficult to attract large numbers of black visitors.
The Black Heritage Trail concludes at the African Meeting House, the
historic center of African-American community life on Beacon Hill, which
was built in 1806. In 2006 the museum, in concert with the NPS and others,
will undertake a bicentennial celebration and public history program which
should be extensive and multi-faceted.
Nina Zannieri, director of the Paul Revere House, writes from an
insider’s perspective about the Freedom Trail but also has a broader vantage
point, as evidenced by her position on the national board of the American
Association of Museums. Zannieri’s essay, “Not The Same Old Freedom
Trail: A View from the Paul Revere House,” addresses how the Freedom
Trail and the Paul Revere House have changed over time. In particular, she
discusses how the Paul Revere House has reinvented itself in order to reveal
the man behind the myth and to explore a variety of themes that embrace
greater complexity. Like Young, Zannieri laments that the Freedom Trail
lacks “an integrated interpretive concept.” She, too, cites approvingly the
NPS study on the trail.
In her essay, “Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning
of the Bunker Hill Monument,” Sarah Purcell focuses on a riveting temporary public art display. Over several evenings in September, 1998, artist
Krzysztof Wodiczko projected a brief video he produced onto the Bunker
Hill Monument of mothers and siblings who had lost loved ones to violence
in Boston. The murderers had not been brought to justice because of a
pervasive neighborhood code of silence. She assesses Wodiczko as an artist
who sought to “reanimate” the monument and details how his project was
developed by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Purcell’s analysis
echoes Zannieri’s approval of an approach to interpretation that is based on
reinvention and critical thinking. Purcell concludes this case study with the
important observation that the meaning of public monuments is never fixed
in time but rather is constantly evolving and changing.
If public historians do not acknowledge this basic point, we can easily
become the mere keepers of static cultural resources that speak with one
predictable voice and invoke an ever more distant past that is increasingly
more difficult to comprehend. Following the Bunker Hill video projection,
BNHP developed a collaborative relationship with the Institute of Contemporary Art. The two institutions now operate an artists-in-residence program which produces innovative temporary public art along the Freedom
Trail both outdoors and within historic sites.
The Freedom Trail is the most venerable history trail in Boston, but by no
means does it stand alone in the city. Besides the Black Heritage Trail,
which originated during the period of civil rights activism in the 1960s,
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BOSTON’S PUBLIC HISTORY
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Boston boasts several other more recent history trails. Three publications
associated with Boston history trails are reviewed by Mark Herlihy. One is
Susan Wilson’s Literary Trail of Greater Boston: A Tour of Sites in Boston,
Cambridge, and Concord, written for an innovative organization fairly new
to the public history scene in Boston, the Boston History Collaborative
under the energetic leadership of Bob Krim. Besides the Literary Trail, the
Collaborative has developed BostonFamilyHistory.com; Boston by Sea: A
Seafaring Adventure through Boston’s Past; and, most recently, Innovation
Odyssey, a bus tour that introduces the people and places behind Boston’s
great inventions. Herlihy also reviews a publication developed by the
Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and A Working People’s Heritage Trail,
written by labor historian James Green.
It is intended for this special section on Boston’s public history to be
illustrative and not at all exhaustive. One recently completed museum, for
example, is Dreams of Freedom, housed at the International Institute of
Boston, which focuses on immigration history with a permanent exhibit and
an engaging series of temporary exhibits with accompanying public programs. In the planning stages is the new Commonwealth Museum on
Massachusetts history to be situated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Archives headquarters, located immediately adjacent to the John F.
Kennedy Presidential Library. The Boston Center for Jewish Heritage is
working to transform a beautiful, historic synagogue on Beacon Hill into a
cultural center that will chronicle and celebrate the Boston and American
Jewish experience. Another project presently in planning is the Boston
History Museum, a projected facility that would focus on the history of
Boston that postdates the American Revolution.
This special section originally stemmed from a session at the annual
meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston in 2001. Organized by Robert Allison of Suffolk University, the session was entitled
“Reconsidering the Future of Boston’s Heritage.” The session raised several
challenging issues that we face as public historians.
An issue that resonates nationwide is the ongoing effort to combat
oversimplified, commercialized history presentations with public history
that is more complex but still entertaining and accessible. If directors of the
historic sites of the Freedom Trail can agree on a coherent story, then
perhaps they will have something tangible with which to counter the
approach that sells history as yet another commodity. Another issue is how
to address the history of newer groups to Boston, especially in light of the
predisposition to focus on the Revolution.5 Funding is yet another concern.
With the promise of an unending war on terrorism, the federal budget is
tight, exacerbated by the commitment of the current administration not to
5. See Felix Matos-Rodriguez, “The Browncoats are Coming: Latino Public History in
Boston,” The Public Historian 23, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 15–28.
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raise taxes. State and municipal budgets are in very poor shape these days,
as is the private sector. Even in the best of times, public history is not a wellendowed sector of the economy.
A problem peculiar to Boston is the impact of September 11, 2001, or
9/11. Two of the four planes that were seized and turned into suicide flights
originated at Boston’s Logan Airport. No doubt this is a significant reason
that overall visitation to Boston has declined since 9/11. It is not clear how
this issue can be addressed successfully other than our enjoying a long
period of no terrorist activity within the United States which would restore
confidence on the part of national and international visitors. However,
sadly, this seems unlikely given the national and international political
framework.
A challenge in Boston and elsewhere for public historians, especially in
times like ours when we experience real national emergency but also
considerable hype, is to counter uncritical celebratory history with historical
interpretation that provides some measure of questioning and promotes
critical thinking. The essays that follow raise many questions and highlight
approaches that public historians can employ to advocate critical thinking in
the public presentation of history.
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