Month: May 2025

In 2025, graduate students in “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” (HIST 625) worked with Historic New England’s Inclusive Descriptions project, which is devoted to reassessing and recontextualizing objects in their collections that have racist or otherwise harmful histories.  This work is a key part of  Historic New England’s commitment to telling diverse and truly reflective stories about life in New England, past and present. Their Recovering New England’s Voices Initiative, seeks to reimagine and recenter storytelling at the sites, emphasizing the voices and presence of historically marginalized individuals and communities. These stories emphasize the lives and labor of enslaved and free people of color, the history and continued presence of Indigenous people, and themes of disability, sexuality, and resistance, among others.   Historic New England continues to implement reparative language descriptions for existing collections and creates respectful and inclusive language descriptions for new collections.

Public History students reinterpreted and rewrote objects and their descriptions for HNE’s digital catalog, focusing on the collections at their Cogswell’s Grant property in Essex, MA, the home of 20th century collectors Bert and Nina Fletcher Little.  

Our historical research and interpretation span the years from pre-contact through the mid 20^th century.  We explored the possibilities of material culture as historical resources and how to interrogate them.  What can an object tell us about the past?  What meanings have different people ascribed to these objects?  Why did collectors acquire these objects and what messages did they use them to convey?  How do we decide what histories are meaningful?  What does the language used to describe and interpret objects tell us about its histories, and what does it exclude?  What are the consequences of those choices? 

This project culminated in a public presentation for Historic New England colleagues and staff, and interested community members, on May 5, 2025.  But this work remains ongoing and incomplete. Historic New England continues to revise, repair, and recontextualize the harmful legacies of slavery, white supremacy, and colonization embedded in their collection’s objects, archives, and at their historic properties.  The History Department at UMass Boston is honored to participate in this crucial ongoing work.

At UMass Boston we are lucky to have a waterfront campus.  Thanks to the work of the Friends of the Boston Harborwalk (FBHW) visitors and community members can walk along the shoreline from East Boston to South Boston, and enjoy interpretive signage orienting them to the past and present along this coast.  They have undertaken a multi-year effort to add engaging, inclusive, and stylistically consistent interpretive signs along Boston’s 43-mile Harborwalk.

While the Harborwalk physically connects people to resources such as parks, museums, beaches and commercial establishments along the shoreline, it also connects visitors to the histories represented by sites along the walk.  The Friends of the Boston Harborwalk signage team works with property owners and all stakeholders to develop content for engaging and inclusive interpretive signs along the Harborwalk.

In spring 2024, public history students in HIST 625 “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” collaborated with FBHW to create a Masterplan for the Dorchester sections of the Harborwalk, proposing site-specific interpretive signs that interpret the social, environmental, cultural and economic histories (and present) visible or once visible along the shoreline. Based on research in primary and secondary sources, conversations with stakeholders from our partnering organizations, and most importantly, members of the Dorchester communities who live, work, and play along the shoreline students identified rich stories, visual resources and sites for interpretation along the waterfront from the South Boston-Dorchester line just south of Moakley Park to, and including, Dorchester Bay Basin Bay. 

Our historical research and interpretation spanned the years from pre-contact through the 21^st century. Our site-based historical research raised questions about the connections between local, regional, and national histories.  We considered questions about whose histories matter and to whom. How were specific places meaningful or significant to local communities and the city of Boston in the past, and today?  What meanings have different people ascribed to this place?  Our exploration of the historical geography and uses of this landscape (and seascape) required us to consider the social, environmental, economic and cultural histories of a wide range of people.  The consequences of this history shape the priorities and policies of today, especially as we face the perils of climate change and the impact of development on land, water, public health, and communities. 

This project culminated in a public presentation of the Master Plan to FBHW and community members, on May 7, 2024.  Since then, the FBHW has used the Master Plan to assist in creating the sign content and work with property owners for design, manufacture, and installation. Boston Harborwalk signage so far can be viewed here, but come back later to explore the Dorchester harbor walk signs!

Known for its association with the battle for political and social rights, Faneuil Hall itself raises a central contradiction, one often overlooked by historical interpretation of this space.  The site memorializes the merchant Peter Faneuil, an enslaver who made his money through the transatlantic slave trade, whose riches built the marketplace he gifted to Boston,  Over the last decade, artists and activists have called for the renaming of Faneuil Hall.  Artists have come forward to propose or install new public art at Faneuil Hall, art that speaks to history in this space, as well as contemporary issues around relevant questions about freedom, social justice, and the role of monuments and public space. 

These conversations prompt questions about the art installed in and around this historic public space.  Over 40 works of art–paintings and sculptures–are installed in Faneuil Hall’s historic second floor meeting space, the Great Hall.  They inspire questions about what this space and place has meant over time and how the city might reimagine this public gallery.  What themes and histories might be represented here?  What is the meaning of Faneuil Hall in the 21st century, informed by the city’s and the nation’s pasts, as well as the present?  Whose stories might appear?  What should a 21st century gallery at Faneuil Hall look like? 

Prompted by the Boston Art Commission’s interest in using art to engage with broader and more diverse histories associated with the site on which Faneuil Hall sits, students in HIST 625 embarked on a project to consider new historical themes for interpreting history at this site.  In the first phase of the work, students researched what we know about the “history” of the Great Hall gallery and its site.  This required research in previous studies of the site, and especially the records of Boston from 1740 to the present, to determine:

• when and how and by whom the extant artworks were chosen,
• the decisions debated and made about choosing artwork over time
• the history that is represented and the history that is ignored; 
• What do the debates/discussion about choosing and installing art for this gallery reveal about the changing meanings and uses of  Faneuil Hall, Boston, history, and the nation? 
• What histories are left out, and how might we tell that history via new installations in the gallery? 

In the second phase of the project students reimagined the gallery as one that would reflect a 21st century understanding of the meaning of Faneuil Hall and Boston’s history and the struggles represented at this site. Indeed, the Hall has been a public space theoretically open to use by the public since 1742.   A newly imagined Great Hall gallery might include some of the art currently installed, and it could include new art created for this space.  A reconceived gallery could showcase and interpret other material culture, such as artifacts and documents.  It could feature media pieces that interpret the meaning of the Hall and its significance in Boston’s history.  These are just a few examples.

Students worked in teams to write proposals for interpretive plans for creating a 21st century gallery for Faneuil Hall. What would it look like today?  What is the message?  Who is included?  How are they represented?  Who chooses?  On May 2, 2023, students presented their proposals for new interpretive ideas and strategies  and examples in the context of NPS themes and priorities and newer interpretive focus exemplified in their recent wayside panel and an exhibition on slavery in Boston.