Boston Sports Tours in action with a group of executives, at Red Auerbach statue, Faneuil Hall.
Few cities in the world have a closer relationship to sports than Boston. From our city’s inception in the seventeenth century to the present day, athletics have played an important role in the city’s cultural and social development. Boston’s themes of freedom, liberty, and revolution show up in the history of Boston sports, both professional and amateur. How can public historians, when showcasing Boston’s sports history, balance the need to narrate the history of sports as entertainment – the championships, the players, etc. – with the important public role that sports has played in Boston’s histories of race, labor, and gender? That is the central question I have sought to answer this fall as I intern at Interpreting Sports, a sports consulting company headed
by UMB public history alumnus Kathryn Harris, working with tour development under her Boston Sports Tours umbrella.
Public historians working across all fields have worked over the past decades to tie narrow historical themes and debates into dialogue and exhibits tailored for a wider audience. Sports history, currently, is behind schedule in that pursuit, and my work this semester with the development of the Title Town Tour has provided me with an inside look at the challenges that come with developing a strong sports history tour that does more than simply narrating names and dates.
The Title Town Tour, which runs from the Boston champions’ parade route at Government Center, to the TD Garden, explores Boston’s history as a city that wins lots of championships. But the central theme of the tour is that, in fact, for much of the twentieth century, our sports teams were not winning championships, and yet the city’s love for sports never faded, and its athletes remained key parts of the city’s fabric in various ways. Sometimes these stories of sport’s importance to Boston are difficult – a stop at the Bill Russell statue by City Hall narrates the Celtics’ legend’s longstanding conflict with the city of Boston, particularly the racism that he experienced throughout his career and violence during the busing crisis.
Me (left) with Kathryn Harris (right) ahead of a Title Town tour.
This semester, my work with Kathryn has focused on tour development to best enhance the visitor experience. We’ve had the opportunity to host a number of tours this fall. The feedback visitors provide about what they want to see and hear is crucial in fine-tuning our tours. Unlike a physical exhibit with labels in place, the walking tour is a moldable object that can be altered each time it is given. Making sure to have a deep knowledge of facts and stories allows us as tour guides to add certain stories as may be necessary when walking to
a certain point, or depending on a visitor’s specific questions.
The most rewarding part of this internship has been understanding more deeply the relationship of sports in Boston to broader historical themes, especially those of race and labor. Boston was the last city to integrate its Major League baseball franchise; the Red Sox did not add their first black player until 1959. Bill Russell experienced vandalism, theft, and violence at the hands of Bostonians in his years as a player and coach. The original Boston Garden held numerous boxing matches that pitted African Americans and first-generation Italian-Americans against each other in an era of heightened racial tension. These are the stories that are generally left out of sports history museums.
It may take many years for sports history museums and tours to get to the stage where historical interpretation is for fields such as slavery, but the work of Harris and others in the field is establishing a useful framework for better linking broader historical themes and the study of sports. A reason that Boston is a good city to put these methods to use is the passion of sports fan in this city, a passion matched by few places in the country. Why are fans passionate here, and how does that passion intersect with other aspects of our city’s history? Every time we take a tour, and speak with a new visitor, and learn their stories, we find a new way to understand and tell the relationship of sports to Boston. A history and a meaning that regularly changes makes this field challenging, but extremely rewarding.
At the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), engaging people in history is their bread and butter. How best to do that remains a perennial question, especially if the audience you’re trying to engage is a bunch of fifth graders. This has been my task for the last several weeks: how do we get fifth graders talking about history and, better yet, practicing vital historical skills?
MHS’s proposition: National History Day (NHD). This is a year-long project in which students in grades six through twelve can choose any topic they please, so long as it fits an annual theme. They conduct primary and secondary source research and present their findings in regional, state, and even national competitions. As Massachusetts’s state sponsor for NHD, MHS provides support and resources for teachers and classrooms across the Commonwealth and coordinates these culminating events.
MHS is approaching NHD a little differently this year. For the first time in Massachusetts, interested fifth graders and teachers can participate in History Day. Under MHS’s Young Historians division, fifth graders can choose to create a poster, podcast, or documentary about a topic that fits this year’s theme –“Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History.”
As this is a pilot program, MHS’s goals are modest. If twenty fifth graders participate this year, that would be a win. That estimate has been blown out of the water. As of now, over two hundred fifth graders have already registered to participate in History Day. Clearly, interest is there. Now comes the work of supporting these classrooms and teachers as they embark on these projects.
Suiting a fifth grade audience requires some significant changes to the History Day program. At the national level, students can choose to create a paper, performance, exhibit, website, or documentary. Not all of these categories are ideal for younger students, however, as they don’t match their capabilities and interests. Massachusetts is following California’s lead and instead offering podcasts for this age group.
Podcasts are ubiquitous in modern popular culture. Fifth graders in this day and age have the wherewithal to record and edit audio/videos on the daily. In this age of social media, why not capitalize on their pre-existing skills? Massachusetts History Day also supports documentaries for this reason, as they are a natural extension of these same media skills. These project categories push students to engage in multiple forms of media to tell a story.
To be successful, these stories must be rooted in history. To provide appropriate and useful resources to these Young Historians, I consulted the Massachusetts 5th grade social studies standards. Many districts in Massachusetts have been using a curriculum called
Investigating History (IH), which pushes students in grades three through seven to answer “authentic, interesting questions that drive toward [a] deeper, richer understanding of the past and the present” (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Investigating History). Based on the units featured in the IH curriculum for 5th grade, I identified three topics that align with MHS archives as well as this year’s NHD theme:
“Colonial Women React to British Taxes,” “Picking Sides in the American Revolution,” and “Early Emancipation: A Personal Revolution.” In a starter pack that I designed for teachers, I identified two primary sources from the MHS archives for each of those three topics. I then created corresponding exercises to help students refine those topics and analyze those primary sources.
All good historians need a supported thesis statement that answers a specific research question. To help a young audience with this sometimes daunting task, I created “topic funnels” to guide them. I outlined the analytical steps to refine a general interest into a narrow research question, leaving the fundamental thesis open for their own interpretation.
Above: An example topic funnel to help 5th graders develop a thesis argument in response to a narrow research question. Here, if students are generally interested in slavery in the 18th century, they can look to primary sources from the MHS to answer the question of how enslaved people responded to slavery and pursued freedom.
To help them answer these research questions, they can engage with two primary sources that offer differing perspectives. With guiding questions alongside each source, students can interrogate how each one informs their knowledge and equips them to answer the research question.
For example, for considering the divided loyalties of Massachusetts colonists leading up to and during the Revolution, MHS has two unique sources which showcase opposing viewpoints. One is a letter authored by Abigail Adams, a famous first lady and outspoken advocate for the Patriot cause. The other is a physical remnant of Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion. Because of his direct ties to the English government, Hutchinson was a staunch Loyalist. Beyond offering diversity of perspective, they show diversity of form. By comparing these two sources, students grow familiar with the many forms historical evidence can take.
Left: Stone Pilaster Capital from the house of Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780), Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/database/4142. Right: Letter (draft) from Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, [3] February 1775, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/database/952. These two sources offer starkly different viewpoints about the American Revolution. Note the imagery of the British Crown in the stone. Meanwhile, Adams writes “we know too well the blessings of freedom, to tamely resign it.”
By pairing these sources with supporting questions, students can interpret and synthesize direct evidence from primary sources. They can then build upon this groundwork by finding additional primary and secondary sources to develop their thesis. It is through these scaffolded exercises that Young Historians can engage with history and launch their projects. By completing NHD projects, these students practice research, historical empathy, project management, critical thinking, and public speaking. These are the very skills that set these students up for long-term success in both NHD and beyond.
Photograph of Mt. Auburn Cemetery, taken by Allison Allen – September 2025
Mount Auburn Cemetery was consecrated in 1831 by Reverend Joseph Story who, in his commemoration speech, compared the goals of the new cemetery’s landscape to such rituals as practiced by the ancients:
“The Greeks exhausted the resources of their exquisite art in adorning the habitations of the dead…[they] consigned their relics to shady groves, in the neighborhood of murmuring streams and mossy fountains, close by the favorite resorts of those who were engaged in the study of philosophy and nature, and called them, with the elegant expressiveness of their own beautiful language χοιμητρια or ‘Places of Repose’.”
(Address at the Consecration of Mount Auburn, Joseph Story 1831)
The cemetery was created as both an experimental garden of the newly formed Massachusetts Horticultural Society and as a solution to Boston’s grave and burial problem. The graveyards within the city were becoming too overpopulated, thought of to be a source of disease, and overall unpleasant. So, Mount Auburn came to be, just four miles outside of Boston, resting within the borders of both Cambridge and Watertown. It is the United States’ first rural cemetery, filled with over 170 acres of woodlands, gardens, and funerary memorials, monuments, and statuary.
The archival department at the cemetery works hard to make all aspects of Mount Auburn’s history accessible through well-researched compilations of topics for future researchers’ use, tours on a variety of subjects for visitors to engage with, and an on-going project to digitize all their records for public access. Some of their existing research/tour subjects include investigations of the Gothic and Egyptian Revival influences and architecture that are generously displayed throughout the landscape. However, prior to my arrival, the Classical architecture and influences found there had yet to be compiled or discussed in depth; perhaps it is because it was felt unnecessary considering the sheer abundance and prominence of Classical forms and influence around the cemetery. As a Classicist entering into the field of Public History, my internship this semester has allowed me to dedicate my expertise to correcting this deficit.
I’m working to accomplish this in a number of ways. First, my goal is to examine and compile all of the influences that led to Classical architecture and the way it manifests itself in the landscape that exists today. With this information, I am creating a research guide for the archival department to use for future research or help with the creation of a tour. Another aspect of my internship that I have taken upon myself is to help locate, photograph, transcribe, and translate any Latin or Ancient Greek inscribed on tombstones or monuments. The “language of the ancients” sometimes adorned the tombstones of educated or religious individuals; however, as classical education/languages have faded from mandatory education, these tombstones have since become illegible to the common visitor.
While on my excursions hunting down these examples of ancient language, I have seen many monuments display a greater than average amount of Classical influence, such as the Binney monument or Edmonia Lewis’ Hygeia monument. However, the one that stands out above the rest would have to be Robert Gould Shaw’s monument–an original bas-relief from first-century BCE Athens is placed at its center.
The bas-relief was apparently evaluated in the 1980s by the late Cornelius C. Vermeule III, a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Vermuele identified the bas-relief as a depiction of the two Boread brothers, the sons of the Greek god of the North Wind, Boreas. I found this a fascinating research subject at first— why would Gould Shaw have the Boread brothers on his funerary monument? Was it a reference to the cold New England weather? Did Boreads have an association with funerary art that I was unaware of or did Gould Shaw use this bas-relief simply because he had it? To answer these questions, I once again returned to the Mount Auburn archives, where the director, Meg Winslow, kindly handed me a binder full of information about the monument.
Today the bas-relief insert of the Robert Gould Shaw monument is, like many other monuments in the cemetery, tragically worn, leaving behind only two barely-humanoid figures, so it was quite easy to trust Vermeule’s evaluation. However, within the binder I came across two photos: a photograph from when the monument was originally erected in 1948 and a sketch of the monument by its architect, Hammat Billings, including a sketch of the bas-relief. There was a glaring detail that made Vermeule’s assessment wrong — one of the figures was a woman.
Ink and graphite sketch of Robert Gould Shaw Monument by Hammat Billings (left). Photograph of Robert Gould Shaw Monument by Southworth & Hawes 1948 (right).
To verify my suspicion, I consulted two of my Classics professors at UMass Boston (Gretchen Umholtz and Chris Cochran) and, giving them no context, asked their opinions. They were of a similar sentiment, and I am now currently working on a proposal to the cemetery for a reassessment of the relief’s content as I myself am not an art historian. After discussions with my professors, I believe that the female figure is Nike, Greek goddess of victory, and that she holds in her hands a scroll that she is either writing on or consulting. The athletic male figure is either a winged depiction of a deceased individual or Eros, the Greek god of love, leaning on a pole or spear. In between the two of them is what may be a sepulchral column and a funerary urn, making this a work of funerary art where Nike is writing down the victorious deeds of the deceased (whether he be in the urn or also the male figure). This interpretation of the bas-relief, I believe, makes much more sense on a funerary monument than two playing wind gods and offers an entirely new context for the Robert Gould Shaw monument.
For 13 weeks this summer, I worked as a Museum Operations Intern with Historic New England at the Lyman Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts. In this role, I did everything from cleaning to making copies to writing Facebook posts to developing programming. This internship gave me the opportunity and the pleasure to dive into the world of museum operations, exploring the daily work of running a museum and learning about the bigger-picture planning that helps public history thrive and allows communities to learn about history.
One of my main projects this summer has been developing new interpretive materials for the third floor of the estate, where the domestic laborers would have lived in the house in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is on the third floor that visitors learn about the lives of Massachusetts mill workers. Currently, they learn about the mill workers in an empty, white room, looking out a window to imagine what life would have looked like in the mills not too far from where the Lyman Estate stands now. I spent my time scouring the internet, looking for high resolution images of the Lyman Mills and their workers. I put together a collection of these images, wrote captions, and created a budget and plan for displaying them on the third floor. My hope was that, by displaying these images on the walls, we would give visitors a stronger sense of the labor history that is being discussed by the tour guide, providing a visual for what their lives would have been like working in the mills.
Additionally, I have been contributing content for the Lyman Estate’s Facebook page. While I am an avid social media user writing these Facebook posts gave me an interesting challenge. I used narratives from tour outlines that featured stories of laborers connected to the estate as well as Historic New England collections for images of the Lyman estate and their workers to create profiles of laborers on the estate for HNE’s social media. It was a challenge to adapt my own rhetoric to speak to a wider audience and practice public outreach in a digital format that was both engaging and accessible.
In addition, worked on planning a May Day event, “Voices of Labor: A May Day Celebration of Work, Struggle, and Solidarity.” This proposed public program will bring together students, historians, labor organizations and the local community to explore labor history and its ongoing relevance. Not only will this event focus on academic research by students and professionals in labor history, sociology, political science, it will also act as an engaging event with theme related community tabling, music, theater, and family-friendly activities throughout the day. The goal is to create a festival-like atmosphere that celebrates workers’ stories while fostering dialogue between academic, community, and labor voices. This portion of my internship has challenged me to identify potential partners like the Tsongas Industrial History Center and local unions, develop a budget and a timeline, and brainstorm related and age appropriate activities for children. Challenged to plan a single event that can reach a wide variety of audiences has revealed how much collaboration and creativity is required in museum programming
Alongside these larger projects, I’ve also learned a lot simply by observing the daily work of my supervisor, Barbara Callahan, required to keep the estate operational as both a museum and an event venue. From balancing the budget to scheduling tours to handling visitor services, it has been an eye-opening experience to see how much behind the scenes planning supports the visitor experience.
From this first hand experience, I have learned that museums are more than historic houses or a set of collections. They are living spaces where interpretation, community engagement, and operations intersect to create experiences. The preservation of history is more than just doing research or creating displays, it is about making history relevant, accessible, and collaborative. Successful public history requires flexibility and a willingness to wear many hats. You have to be a historian, an educator, and event planner, a good communicator and a problem solver all at once.
Bridging history and contemporary life requires adaptability, creativity, and collaboration across many different areas, from curatorial research to event logistics. I’ve learned that public history is as much about people as it is about the past.
Reimagining Public History Through Community Memory
Dana Royster-Buefort, sitting for an Oral History June 25, 2015. Photo by Kayla Graffam
When Dana Royster-Buefort, a retired teacher, sat down with a stack of yearbooks from her time at Thompson Middle School, she wasn’t just sharing photographs. She was preserving the heartbeat of Boston’s educational past. She could point out any of her past students, telling a story for each one. This moment, captured during the 2025 Boston Teachers Union Digitizing Day, reflects the power that participatory archiving holds to humanize our history. Public history, at its core, is an effort to democratize the past. It is grounded in the belief that history does not solely reside in official documents or in the interpretations of professional historians, but is also embedded in the experiences, materials, and memories of individuals and communities. However, many community members never have the chance to document their history in a formal capacity.
A Collaboration Rooted in Community
On Wednesday, June 25th, 2025, UMass Boston archivists, historians, and students partnered with the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) to host a Digitizing Day, encouraging BTU members past and current to bring in photographs, documents, yearbooks and more that they wished to contribute to the growing BTU Collections, hosted at UMass Boston. The participatory archiving model and program we used for this event was developed as the Mass Memories Road Show at UMass Boston, where it has been going strong for 21 years. (Mass Memories Road Show) While the road show model was originally designed as a one time, community based event, the model has been expanded to work directly with community organizations and institutions, including the BTU in 2018 (BTU 2018) as part of larger collecting initiatives.
These events are not simply a documentation effort. They are an act of collective memory-making. By centering the voices of educators and school workers, events like these preserve underrepresented narratives and highlight the role that teachers play as both witnesses to and participants in Boston’s ongoing struggles for equity and justice in the public education system. The 2018 event with the Boston Teachers Union launched a larger initiative to record the experiences of BTU educators and staff, and continue building a community archive that is reflective of their perspectives and their stories.
Now, in 2025, thanks to funding from the Mellon Foundation by way of UC-Irvine, we have been able to continue the work of participatory archiving and set up the Boston Teachers Union for success in hosting future events themselves. Not only were we able to have the event thanks to the Mellon Grant, we were also able to purchase all new camera and recording equipment for BTU to record more oral histories and events, as well as purchase a scanner for digitizing in the future.
On the day, we collected a number of incredible photographs and documents, including yearbook photos, pictures of field trips, and even t-shirts. Using Mellon grant funds, UMass Boston Archives also helped the Boston Teachers Union collect a number of recorded histories in video form with our Video Station at the event. Union members could sit and discuss some of their favorite memories as well as thoughts on certain topics and issues, and the discussions were recorded to be uploaded onto the website and included in the digital collections.
Challenging Traditional Archival Norms
Participatory Archiving events like these ones help to challenge traditional assumptions surrounding history and historical preservation. Conventional archives are often privileged records produced by institutions, whether they be government agencies, large organizations, or famous figures. These histories are often prioritized over those generated by individuals and grassroots organizations. These imbalances can reinforce narratives that center power while marginalizing the perspectives of those directly affected by policy decisions, like the desegregation of Boston schools or the development of programming for students with disabilities. While the Boston Teachers Union is a larger organization, it wasn’t always, and there is plenty of room for growth and expansion when it comes to documenting and sharing BTU history.
Participatory archiving provides an alternative model. Rather than collecting materials about communities (as outsiders looking in), we are able to work directly with community members who can identify, describe, and contextualize the records being collected. This process shifts the authority and expertise, recognizing that those who lived the history are best positioned to interpret and give meaning to it.
My Role in the Event as a UMB Graduate Student
In preparation for this event, I spent my time doing a number of things. My main task was developing timelines of events for our three main topics of interest: School Closures, Students with Disabilities, and Desegregation and Busing in the Boston area. These topics were chosen for specific reasons. As both a labor union and a long-standing force in Boston’s public education system, the BTU offers a rare window into how teachers have shaped (and been shaped by) major historical moments like desegregation, school closures, and inclusion reform.
BTU Digitizing Day: Gathering information about documents. Photo by Nick Juravich
This past school year marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of court-ordered school desegregation. (Colors of Solidarity) Many current and retired BTU members experienced this firsthand, either as students or teachers. Considering the anniversary, we wanted to take the opportunity to ask those who experienced the results of Judge Garrity’s decision first hand about their experience. (Snapshot: Desegregation 1974).
School closures are a constant feature of BTU and Boston history, and a major point of contention throughout the past 50 years. With closures continuing even today, with the closure of Lilla Frederick Middle School in Dorchester. (Frederick Middle School) School closures are an ongoing conversation, and making it a focus during this Digitizing Day allowed educators active and retired the opportunity to discuss their thoughts and feelings around these closures.
We also had a heavy focus on inclusion and special education in Boston public schools, especially considering the ongoing organization for BTU’s “inclusion done right” initiative. We focused on the development of programs for special education and adequate pay and funding for teachers and paraprofessionals. (BTU Inclusion) We wanted to take this opportunity to give educators the chance to speak about their experience with these programs and reflect on how this experience has changed over time.
Using the information we already have available to us, gathered from previous participatory archiving events, I was able to develop simple timelines that offered an overview of the topics, highlighting specific events that shaped and changed life for students and teachers alike. In addition to research and planning, I helped with site visits, equipment set-up, and helping to ensure that volunteers had everything they needed for a successful day.
As a Public History student, this experience has been incredibly valuable. Not only did I have the opportunity to witness the behind the scenes aspects of organizing an event like this one, I was able to actively participate in the process, working directly with BTU employees, doing site visits and helping purchase equipment that was used for the event. I also helped the volunteers, and was working directly with the community members who were coming to participate in the event. I was able to meet many of them, discuss the items and documents they were bringing in, and learned about their time as educators. I spoke with one teacher, Roberta Cohen who used to take her students on field trips every other month. We spoke for nearly thirty minutes, discussing all the students she had as she showed me photo album after photo album, all images she had taken of her students.
What Counts as History?
BTU Digitizing Day: Gathering information about documents. Photo by Nick Juravich.
One thing that really stuck out to me throughout my time at the BTU was how many people didn’t realize what “counted” as history. I spoke with a number of different people, some BTU members, some retired volunteers, and some current teachers, who were under the impression that photographs were what “counted” as history, and that’s all we were looking to digitize. I remember mentioning to one of the volunteers that I was hoping people would bring some lesson plans, as I had a special interest in seeing how lesson planning has changed over the last few decades. She seemed confused, and asked if that counted. I explained that history, and what is considered important to collect and document, is anything that you consider important, or find special. It doesn’t have to be simply photographs or yearbooks. It could be lesson plans, notes from students, gradebooks, even physical items like t-shirts or student gifts. What makes participatory archiving and community archives unique and important is the fact that we are collecting personal stories and things that might not have been deemed important by others.
Looking Ahead
Our work isn’t finished. I will be continuing to work with the BTU, the UMB Archives, and Professor Juravich to further organize and categorize the items that we collected. We will work to get the images uploaded to the digital archive and made available to the public. I will also be working with Professor Juravich to develop a Digital Exhibit based on the materials we collected, to add to the current digital exhibitions that have been posted throughout the years these events have been taking place. I hope to find some common threads between the photographs and other items we digitized.
After this event and beginning the digitization process, I can’t help but reflect on how many powerful stories still remain untold. This past event gave us the opportunity to speak with and record the history of 16) people. In just four hours, we gathered a large number of stories that deserve to be preserved forever. We can only guess as to what will be accomplished as BTU continues this event on their own. Participatory archiving offers a path forward, not only to preserve the past, but to shape a more inclusive and equitable historical record.
