Lost on the Freedom Trail by Seth C. Bruggeman is a historical monograph that revises and recontextualizes an administrative history of the Boston National Historical Park (BNHP) that the author wrote between 2015 and 2020 under a cooperative agreement between the National Park Service (NPS) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Lost on the Freedom Trail not only adds another excellent case study to the UMass Press’s Public History in Historical Perspective series but also provides a much-needed analysis of how the NPS sought to operate a historical park in one of the nation’s most historically rich yet socially divided cities. On a broader level, Bruggeman’s book offers an extended, granular exploration of a long history of NPS struggles to carry out effective historical interpretation, a story that is outlined in the OAH report Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service by Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Marla R. Miller, Gary B. Nash, and David Paul Thelen (2011).
Bruggeman’s purpose in Lost on the Freedom Trail is to explain how the BNHP, which in some respects has been a model for urban national parks, is freighted with prejudices and preoccupations that long antedate the postwar era. In a compelling first chapter, Bruggeman presents the formation of the Freedom Trail in 1951 as a culmination of the crafting of a selective, exclusionary history over many years. Bruggeman argues that influential Bostonians began as early as the 1820s to exhibit some of the mindsets that later guided decisions about creating an urban national park. Among these were a reverence for Revolutionary heroes and an interest in enshrining and turning a profit from Revolutionary-era Boston landmarks. He also sets up a central theme in the book—that of an alignment of federal and local interests on the interlinked agendas of urban renewal and development of the Freedom Trail, which “mapped nineteenth-century ideas about the past onto Boston’s twentieth-century streets” (46). This aligning of interests, Bruggeman asserts, thereby preserved and packaged a selective past to generate profit. Chapter 2 introduces the Boston National Historic Sites Commission (established by Congress in 1955) and explores how it began to envision a park inspired by Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park. Its vision comprised an assemblage of sites managed through cooperative agreements and meshed with broader efforts to use urban renewal to recast the urban landscape.
The next three chapters examine how the long, difficult path toward the creation of the Boston National Historical Park produced a park that privileged civic boosters’ and business leaders’ pro-growth agenda over the needs of working-class Bostonians, who bore the brunt of the displacement wrought by urban renewal. Although the park’s formation in 1974 anticipated the powerful commemorative moment of the coming US Bicentennial, the NPS failed to connect interpretive planning meaningfully with the people who lived closest to the park. Further, it did little to shed light on how convulsive events such as anti-busing protests and assaults in defiance of court-ordered desegregation of Boston’s public schools might reflect the long-ignored theme of an unfinished American Revolution.
A sixth and final chapter argues that the BNHP underwent at best a partial transformation into a more effective, well-regarded park in the 1980s and 1990s. As he does throughout the book, here Bruggeman presents another example of how certain able and well-intentioned individuals labored for newer, more expansive, and inclusive interpretations but faced strong headwinds from others who wanted to conserve older, more restrictive representations of the past. In this case, he details the clashes between a progressive BNHP historian and the park’s reactionary superintendent. In reading these accounts, one cannot help but recall the contention in Imperiled Promise that innovation in national parks too often happened not because of any systemic commitment to broad, inclusive interpretation but instead from the work of dedicated individuals who carved out their own spaces despite bureaucratic inertia.
In an afterword, Bruggeman wisely avoids delving too much into the recent past, citing the challenge of finding sufficient source material as NPS recordkeeping migrated to electronic forms. Nevertheless, he demonstrates that by continuing to be enmeshed in an agenda that privileges “revenue over equity,” the endeavor of interpreting Boston’s history still falls short of its promise, defaulting to a romanticized, patriotic portrait of Revolutionary Boston while leaving the public effectively “lost” in any attempt to connect the past and present (231). Strikingly, Bruggeman concludes that the Freedom Trail’s red line both evokes the redlining policies that inspired the urban renewal impulses from which it was born and perpetuates a similar marginalization of those Bostonians whose right to the city the park’s champions were complicit in denying.
Lost on the Freedom Trail adds an important chapter to the story of how public history sites emerged, evolved, and responded to the politics and preoccupations of the present as much as—or more than—they reflected the times they commemorated. It also builds meaningfully on other notable books about other urban NPS sites such as Charlene Mires’s Independence Hall in American Memory (2002) and Cathy Stanton’s The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (2006), as well as on Lizabeth Cohen’s Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (2019) and other recent studies of urban renewal. On another level, students of historic preservation will benefit from reading Bruggeman’s work. At times the sheer complexity of the administrative history that serves as the book’s foundation makes it challenging to remain focused on the continuities of its high-level argument despite his accessible writing style. Although Bruggeman provides strong signposting and well-crafted, poignant conclusions, it is hard to imagine many undergraduate students reading the book. Nonetheless, Lost on the Freedom Trail is an impressive contribution that public history faculty, graduate students, and practitioners will find essential. It offers one of the most sophisticated and resonant case studies on the intersection of modern urban and public history.