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3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

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

Paperback

Series: Public History in Historical Perspective

20th Century United States HistoryGeneral SociologyRegional: New England

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1625346239
ISBN13: 9781625346230
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: Feb 25 2022
Pages: 344
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.87 Width: 5.91 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Winner of the 2023 Society for History in the Federal Government Book Prize

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.

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20th Century United States History