Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Abstract

Boston is a city built for horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians. It is a city of cold nights and colder winters. It features “Birthplace of the American Revolution” souvenirs for outsiders, Boston sports paraphernalia for insiders, and university merchandise for all. Like any city, you can absorb, consume, interpret, reinterpret, and capitalize on Boston's brand. But unlike many cities, a series of coordinated historical markers guides tourists through a constructed narrative of the American Revolution. In total, sixteen markers comprise the Freedom Trail, including Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere's House, and the ship from the Boston Tea Party. One paradox of the Freedom Trail is that while it presents the earliest events of American history, including the people and places that enabled the creation of a country, the United States already had to be a country for these markers to take on meaning. This conflict between the historical process of making meaning and the presentation of constructed sites as authentic, inevitable, and timeless is the key starting point for Seth C. Bruggeman's Lost on the Freedom Trail.How does the Freedom Trail shape collective memory for visitors from across the country and around the world? Bruggeman engages a more local history, one with arguably more national significance than the Freedom Trail itself. He asks: How did the process of using local sites to interpret the American Revolution compound the oppression of some of the people who benefited the least from American independence, such as Black Bostonians? Bruggeman argues that despite the idea of a Freedom Trail's potential for building community and interrogating foundational histories, its construction has displaced communities and supplied a complicated narrative. In the hands of the right students and historians, Lost on the Freedom Trail might, in the long term, contribute substantially to solving such heavy issues. The dearth of employment opportunities in the professoriate increases the likelihood that freshly minted historical thinkers—capable and critical—will occupy some of the policymaking positions that become historical actors in this story.With nods to public history projects and early American historiography, Bruggeman walks through Boston's history of remembering the American Revolution, observing: “Allusions to the American Revolution are so ubiquitous that, in some sections, little sense lingers of what happened before or after the two decades we typically associate with the nation's founding drama” (20). In addition to seeing where events transpired, visitors might feel when events happened. Bruggeman historicizes that “sense of history” by tracing collective memory in Boston from the eighteenth century to the Cold War. By the 1950s, tourists sought the “historical North End conjured by Longfellow” but encountered another world. He notes that one tourist “left in a hurry” due to the “urchins” spotted at the Paul Revere House (44).The Freedom Trail, which opened in 1951, earned National Park Service status in 1974. Bruggeman contextualizes the idea for the Freedom Trail at its point of origin: Cold War America in 1951, full of American patriotism, capitalist pride, and postwar uses of public space. Federal and local records tell the administrative story and show how Bostonians collaborated with congressional representatives in Washington, D.C. to bring the Freedom Trail to life. The heart of Bruggeman's study actively centers race and racism within the history of the Freedom Trail. He connects the Freedom Trail's role in the story of constructing public memory at the 1976 bicentennial with rising racial tensions, emphasizing the 1970s as a pivotal decade for historical reinterpretations of the confluct. Episodes covered include the racist violence suffered by Charles Battles, a black history teacher who, in November 1977, brought his students from Pennsylvania on a field trip to Boston's historic sites. Near Bunker Hill, five white supremacists attacked the visitors with “golf clubs, axe handles, and hockey sticks” (153). While Battles and his class survived, this trauma highlighted the disconnect between the Freedom Trail and the harrowing racist violence that endured in its vicinity.In Bruggeman's eyes, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the Freedom Trail's focus moved away from critical engagement with historical scholarship and toward unabashed consumerism. While administrative records skillfully support this claim, the addition of visitors’ oral histories from the 1990s would have been a useful source. How did consumer-oriented public history shape visitors’ experiences and their knowledge of the past? What do Bruggeman's students—or even his colleagues—remember about visiting the Freedom Trail during the chronology of this book? While these questions might better serve a separate project, Bruggeman leaves no room for doubt that administrative policies and visitors’ experiences comprise a similar version of this story.Lost on the Freedom Trail converts a largely concealed institutional history of the Freedom Trail into a readable narrative. Bruggeman analyzes the twentieth century's interpretation of events of the eighteenth century in Boston. He opens with an author's note about racial reckoning in recent years and closes by mentioning a few subsequent changes, notably Faneuil Hall's grappling with its complicity in chattel slavery. Lost on the Freedom Trail reaffirms the assertion that because our understanding of the past has consistently undergone evolutions, it will continue to do so. This book will do well in the hands of people who want to be onsite when that change happens.