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

FAIN: FT-270255-20

Seth C. Bruggeman
Temple University (Philadelphia, PA 19122-6003)

Research and writing of a book on the establishment of history parks on the model of Boston’s National Historical Park after World War II.

"Lost on the Freedom Trail" is a book project that examines the National Park Service's efforts after World War II to create history parks in American cities. At its core is the institutional history of Boston National Historic Park. Congress established this park in 1974. The NPS conceived of it as a template for all urban parks. This posed a problem, I argue, in that the template internalized the logic of Boston’s postwar urban renewal campaign, which mingled cultural heritage with profit, private investment, and racial erasure. My work demonstrates that, despite resistance from within the agency and among its stakeholders, decisions made over a half century ago in Boston about the role and purpose of history account in part for the unfortunate state of public history in the NPS today.

Associated Products

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston (Book)
Title: Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston
Author: Seth C. Bruggeman
Abstract: Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually. Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga. Making sense of the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park Service to create this historical park for the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might prevail over gentrification and profit.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.umasspress.com/9781625346230/lost-on-the-freedom-trail/
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781625346230
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston (Book)
Title: Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston
Author: Seth C. Bruggeman
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Type: Single author monograph

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