Stories

Crispus Attucks

The First to Fall

Crispus Attucks died in the snow outside the Custom House, shot through the chest by British musket fire. He was approximately forty-seven years old, a sailor and rope-maker, a man of African and Nati...

George Robert Twelves Hewes

A Shoemaker at Griffin's Wharf

George Robert Twelves Hewes was thirty-one years old in December 1773—a shoemaker struggling to support his family in a town where business was bad and politics was everywhere. He had already witnesse...

Dr. Joseph Warren

A Doctor Goes to War

Joseph Warren could have stayed behind the lines. At thirty-four, he held a general's commission in the Massachusetts militia. He had been the organizing intelligence of Boston's resistance, the man w...

Phillis Wheatley

Writing in Chains

Phillis Wheatley wrote about liberty while enslaved. The contradiction was not lost on her or her readers. In 1773, the year of the Tea Party, Wheatley's collection of poems was published in London—t...

Walking Where It Happened

I've walked the Freedom Trail thousands of times—2.5 miles, sixteen official sites, roughly ninety minutes if you don't stop. But I never walk it the same way twice. Every group brings different ques...

Objects and Their Stories

Every object in our collection has multiple stories. The challenge is choosing which to tell. Take the tea chests from the Tea Party—we have fragments, pieces the colonists missed. One story: brave p...

The City That Preserved Itself

Boston almost didn't preserve its Revolutionary sites. In the nineteenth century, economics trumped heritage—old buildings came down, streets were widened, the waterfront was transformed. The site of ...

Teaching the Whole Story

My students live in the city where the Revolution started. They walk past these sites every day. But the textbook version often doesn't connect with them. I start with Crispus Attucks. A Black man, p...