Freedom Trail

Walk the 1959 Boston Freedom Trail!

The city of Boston is rich in history and loves to display it. But this history is a specific, highly tailored and marketed history to the nationalist American History Project. The Boston Freedom Trail® is paramount in this produced narrative. The Freedom Trail’s® website outlines the importance of sixteen sites, and in a seemingly important way, they have connected the dots. In the way that we understand history to be produced, sometimes shifting though imagined to be concrete, the Freedom Trail® has shifted over time as well. Walk the trail and notice several abandoned patches and several added since the trail was “invented” in 1951 by journalist William Schofield. What does it mean to physically rewrite history, how does heritage tourism affect the construction and digestion of history?