But for a special group of students, the campus steeped in the past was the ideal place to prepare for the future. They came to Suffolk with a passion for the nation’s lore. History professors like Robert Allison and Kathryn Lasdow ensured they left with the tools to examine nuanced events and craft stories that will inspire future generations. Today, a large network of dedicated alumni and students serve as curators, interpreters, researchers, park rangers, interns, and leaders at historic sites and museums around the country, and especially in Boston where they cluster together at the institutions that dot the Freedom Trail alongside Suffolk’s campus in the hub of Revolutionary history.
Now these Rams are cueing up the fife and drum for America’s 250th, the biggest anniversary in modern memory, amidst a time of political division and rapid change where Americans are grappling with what identity, patriotism, and freedom really mean.
Allison, a nationally known scholar, author, and noted Boston historian, is at the center of it all. As chair of the nonprofit Revolution 250, he’s convened leaders of more than 70 organizations across the government, educational, and cultural sectors to plan shared programming throughout Massachusetts to mark each milestone on the road to the Revolution—from the Boston Massacre to Evacuation Day—leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Allison sees the opportunity and the challenge clearly: This anniversary, he says, offers “a moment to get new generations excited about the story, so they’ll continue to come.”
Just two years ago, more than 20,000 visitors crowded onto Atlantic Wharf to watch reenactors dump crates of black tea into the ocean for the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, one of the events in 1773 that would help spark the revolution. In 2023, the familiar annual event felt like the start of something new and special, a renaissance of interest in Revolutionary history. “People were coming from all over the country for this and wanted to be here,” Allison says.
Now it’s up to public historians to harness this enthusiasm to inspire visitors to dig deeper into the foundational events and figures who continue to shape our country. By ignoring the human stories, Allison acknowledges that historians have sometimes “done our best to kill any kind of an interest” people might have in history. So he and his Suffolk colleagues have worked tirelessly to bring those stories to life through a hands-on, practical history program grounded in the humanities. The ripple effect of their efforts can be seen every day in the work of students and alumni in museums and on tours throughout the city, and is on full display as Boston celebrates the nation’s 250th anniversary.
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spring 2026
Evacuation Day 2026, Dorchester Heights, Boston.
Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
ost every Suffolk student knows the shortcut alongside the graves of Samuel Adams and John Hancock in the Granary Burying Ground leads to the back entrance of the Stahl Center, and that grabbing a slice at Sal’s on Court Street puts you a few musket
lengths from the spot where Crispus Attucks and four other Bostonians were shot by British troops. No doubt, all have overheard a nugget of history from a colonial-garbed tour guide at the corner of Beacon and Tremont.
“Leaning into the complexities of the American story
need not take away from ‘the tricorn-hat joy of it all. No
one loses when more voices are added to the story.'”
—Suffolk History Professor KATHRYN Lasdow
TRAVEL BACK IN TIME,
ONLINE
ACCESS an interactive map of Revolutionary-era Boston, peppered with lesser-known tales from Suffolk’s alumni, faculty, and student historians.
Innovating ways to captivate the public is a specialty of Matthew Wilding, BA ’06, senior director of interpretation and future planning at Revolutionary Spaces, the nonprofit that stewards both the Old South Meeting House and Old State House.
He started as a tour guide in colonial costume while still a Suffolk student, drawing in crowds with comic banter mixed with interesting facts as they passed by landmarks from Boston Common to Faneuil Hall. The audience would tip well—an essential requirement for a student working multiple jobs to put himself through school—and at the end of the 1.2-mile-long tour he’d sprint back and do it all again before returning once more for his afternoon classes.
“It was fun and exciting to try to turn yelling about history in jokey stories to tourists into a business,” says Wilding. “I used to say it was tricking people into learning something, and that worldview has been really helpful to me in museums.”
In 2015, for the opening of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Dorchester, Wilding helped launch a game-based learning simulation in which attendees play the roles of senators debating a piece of legislation. Bracing himself for chaos as the first group of unruly high schoolers spilled into the room, instead Wilding saw immediate engagement. The teenagers argued about aspects of the bill—“a boring and bad piece of legislation from 1850”—for three hours and left still talking about it on the bus.
For Wilding it was a revelatory moment.
“There’s an inclination in the field of public history to kind of look down at people for not knowing stuff, but that’s why they came, right? It’s to find out. It’s our job to tell them, and we need to do it in a way that has a hook,” says Wilding.
As groups of visitors enter the Old South Meeting House on Washington Street, there’s a palpable energy shift. Movements become more careful, voices hushed. The grand building inspires reverence, even awe. But if all goes to plan, Wilding’s latest endeavor will change all that.
As the lights dim, a booming bass vibrates through the antique floorboards as projectors and transparent OLED screens turn the stately space into one massive, immersive theatre.
An animated teenage mouse named Jeremy takes control of the narrative. Jeremy’s family has called the Old South Meeting House home since it was built in 1729, and mouse family members have witnessed pivotal moments from the Revolution onward. Jeremy rockets through time, meeting his ancestors and taking visitors on a 20-minute journey through nearly 300 years of the city’s history.
Timed to capitalize on the culmination of the 250th, Jeremy is part of Ruckus!, an ambitious, first-of-its-kind multimedia experience that opens this July and will help take Revolutionary Spaces into its next era. The goal, says Wilding, is to move beyond traditional static displays and sweep the audience up in an accessible story that resonates with all ages.
Michele McCue, Class of 2026, began work last fall as a historical interpretation intern at the Paul Revere House in the North End. She loved connecting with visitors from around the world, especially the next generation of potential history buffs, by contextualizing Revere’s brave acts with the realities of his home life.
She’s also channeled Allison’s passion for busting myths and seeking out lesser-known facts—including the strong likelihood that Revere never said, “The British are coming!” because most colonists at the time identified as British.
Working at the historic site sparked an aha moment for McCue as well. She first fell in love with history as a fifth grader when she portrayed female Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson in her school’s “living museum.” She was able to cap her college experience by learning more about a special connection between Sampson and the renowned patriot.
Using a combination of primary source documents and digital records, McCue delved into Sampson’s service and life after the war. Because of her gender, Sampson was initially denied a military pension. Few people know that Revere used his influence to help change that, says McCue.
“He wrote to a politician and described her as ‘a woman whose character and conduct deserved respect and whose suffering entitled her to compensation,’” says McCue, whose original research about Sampson, gender, and Revolutionary memory will appear in The Revere House Gazette. “And she did get her pension.”
On the front lines
Suffolk students excel at drawing out the contradictions and nuances of the past, says Suffolk History Professor Kathryn Lasdow, who established the public history concentration in 2018.
Leaning into the complexities of the American story need not take away from “the tricorn-hat joy of it all,” she says. “No one loses when more voices are added to the story.”
Lasdow recently cocurated the exhibition Terrains of Independence at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map & Education Center, challenging traditional narratives and examining the pivotal role geography played in first sparking revolutionary fervor in Boston. It used maps as tools for uncovering the deeper “where” questions of revolutionary history, rather than as static backdrops for familiar stories of patriotic fervor.
The exhibit was particularly important because it enabled 21st-century tourists accustomed to zoom-in options and to 3D renderings to better grasp how people across the social and political spectrum lived alongside one another in the prosperous port city. It also made clear the features that made Boston valuable to Britain—its deep harbor, network of wharves, and location in the New England region—and that eventually transformed it into a center of resistance.
The American Revolution wasn’t just fought on the battlefield, Lasdow says. It played out in civic landmarks and the intimate spaces of daily life. “Zooming in to the smallest scale allows us to think about how an abstract clash of values and ideals materialized in people’s individual worlds. We wanted visitors to come away with a new way of looking at the American Revolution.”
That perspective has shaped the way her students approach their work as well.
As an education specialist at the Museum of African American History (MAAH), Selvin Backert, BA ’24, knows he has a rare opportunity to share stories visitors to Boston might not hear anywhere else.
One of his favorite anecdotes is about Zipporah Potter Atkins, the first Black woman to own property in the city of Boston.
He loves to ask tour groups what year they think that took place. Their guesses are usually centuries off. Backert smiles. “She did that all the way back in the 1670s.”
Growing up in nearby Lexington, the famous home of the “shot heard round the world,” Backert says he learned a lot about the Revolutionary War. But it wasn’t until he took classes in history, Black studies, and women’s and gender studies at Suffolk—and started interning at the nearby MAAH—that he realized important narratives had been left out.
Coinciding with the 250th, one of the museum’s current exhibitions, Black Voices of the Revolution: Liberty, Emancipation, and the Struggle for Independence, addresses the contradictions of the fight for freedom in a country where slavery was legal.
At some national museums and historic sites, exhibits focusing on similar narratives have been altered or removed to comply with a 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which seeks to limit topics that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
Backert believes it’s essential to help visitors understand and appreciate the achievements of Americans whose fight for freedom did not end with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He points to the contributions of Boston’s Black Revolutionary War veterans.
“The history we tell disrupts the narrative at its base level. That is what’s so important about doing the work generally, but also doing the work within this space, in this city, in this moment,” says Backert.
The American story, revisited
On quiet mornings, Lucy Pollock, BA ’22, can feel the weight of 300 years of history as she steps softly into the Old South Meeting House. The Boston Tea Party was planned in this room. Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet, worshipped as a congregant in the balcony above.
Her ongoing mission as exhibits manager for Revolutionary Spaces is to distill centuries of events, people, documents, and research into meaningful displays that educate and entertain visitors of every age and background—including work on the upcoming Ruckus! experience. It’s a big task during a big moment, but Pollock is fueled by the desire to reveal the human stories behind some of the country’s founding myths.
Many of the revolutionaries students read about in history books today dealt with the same issues as modern folks, explains Pollock. Some couldn’t pay their bills. Others struggled with mental illness. “Normal, typical person things,” she says.
“When you can start to see these grand Revolutionary figures as day-to-day people with their own lives and their own issues, you realize that you as an individual can actually be quite an impactful and important person. Especially in the 250th year, learning that your voice matters—and that the challenges that you see for society can be fixed by normal people banding together—is one of the most important things the American Revolutionary story can teach us,” she says.
For Quigley, any discussion of the Revolution is incomplete without the voice of William Cooper Nell, a Beacon Hill abolitionist and journalist whose 1855 book, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, is considered the first military-history text written by a Black American.
“He’s one of the reasons why we know the name Crispus Attucks,” explains Quigley. Once slandered or overlooked, Attucks, a Black and Indigenous sailor who was killed in what became known as the Boston Massacre, is now recognized as one of the first casualties in America’s fight for freedom.
Lessons for the ages
“We like to say that Bostonians did the real legwork of the Revolution, and Philadelphians just did the paperwork,” says Lucy Pollock, BA ’22, exhibits manager for the Old State House (at rear) and the Old South Meeting House. Photograph by Adam DeTour.
As chair of the nonprofit Revolution 250, Suffolk History Professor Robert Allison has convened more than 70 organizations across the government, educational, and cultural sectors to plan shared programming to mark each milestone on the road to the Revolution—from the Boston Massacre to Evacuation Day. Photograph by Branden Bruso.
Selvin Backert, BA ’24, talks with visitors about the Museum of African American History’s exhibition addressing the contradictions of the fight for freedom in a country where slavery was legal.
Photograph by Adam DeTour.
“The history we tell disrupts the narrative at its base level. That is what’s so important about doing the work generally, but also doing the work within this space, in this city, in this moment.”
—SELVIN BACKERT, BA ’24, EDUCATION SPECIALIST, MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
“We have an opportunity to tell that multilayered history [so that people] find inspiration in the Revolution and use that history to speak to their present.”
—Shawn Quigley, BS ’14, National Park Service Ranger
“I love history for the sense of discovery, and being able to whittle down really big concepts, moments, things that don’t seem real, and finding the humanity in those moments that really can connect us,” says NPS Ranger Shawn Quigley, BS ’14.
Photograph by Adam DeTour.
Because many visitors will also head to Lexington and Concord, where the Revolution began the morning of April 19, 1775, Annaliese Arnsten, BA ’24, hopes to use the opportunity to highlight the quieter, but no less courageous, work of women in remembering the war.
Now in graduate school for museum studies at Tufts, Arnsten worked as a curatorial intern at Lexington History Museums last summer and continues to volunteer there. For the semiquincentennial, she has helped create interpretive panels for a mini-exhibit in Lexington Center on the roles of women in the Revolution through the objects they preserved and passed along—including documents requesting compensation that they sent to the government and mourning portraits they created for family members who lost their lives during the war.
Her Lexington project, to be displayed in prominent shop windows, is meant to be accessible, a crucial part of engaging the public, she says. “That’s what I really enjoyed about being in downtown Boston and Suffolk, that the history is so visible, and you can just enjoy it walking to class. You don’t have to pay entry to a museum. You can just experience it in your everyday life, all around you,” Arnsten says.
Even when he’s on vacation, National Park Service Ranger Shawn Quigley, BS ’14, can usually be found at a historic site or national park. An extrovert who grew up traveling to Civil War battlefields with his family, Quigley still marvels at the fact that he gets paid to do what he loves every day.
“I love history for the sense of discovery, and being able to whittle down really big concepts, moments, things that don’t seem real, and finding the humanity in those moments that really can connect us,” says Quigley.
The 250th is a chance to celebrate those moments on a grander scale, he says. The “Ken Burns impact”—heightened interest in all things related to the American Revolution, including the superstar documentarian’s 12-hour miniseries—means historians are pulling out the big guns (quite literally) to draw in some of the biggest crowds he’s seen in his time as a ranger.
Teams of oxen lumbered through the streets of South Boston on March 17, pulling cannons as they would have done two and a half centuries ago, bringing desperately needed munitions from upstate New York to end the Siege of Boston. It was a daring and improbable journey engineered by bookseller-turned-military-strategist Henry Knox, who would become the country’s first secretary of war.
On this day in 2026, Quigley wore his ranger uniform proudly as he mixed among the costumed reenactors. He hailed attendees and familiar faces like Allison, his former professor, as he played his part in the Evacuation Day festivities organized by a collaboration between the National Park Service, Revolution 250, the South Boston Citizens’ Association, and other historic and civic groups. He says it’s vital to create these place-based learning experiences that remind people how history remains relevant to their lives—and show why their tax dollars help support preservation.
“One of the things that we have an opportunity to do in Boston is tell that multilayered history, those stories of different generations, [so that people] find inspiration in the Revolution and use that history, those moments, to speak to their present,” he says.
“There’s an inclination in the field of public history to kind of look down at people for not knowing stuff, but that’s why they came, right? It’s to find out. It’s our job to tell them, and we need to do it in a way that has a hook.”
—MATTHEW WILDING, BA ’06, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF
INTERPRETATION AND FUTURE PLANNING, REVOLUTIONARY SPACES
As a student, Matthew Wilding, BA ’06, worked as a tour guide dressed in colonial garb; today he is a leader of the nonprofit that stewards both the Old South Meeting House and Old State House.
Photograph by Adam DeTour.
Suffolk senior Michele McCue worked as a historical interpretation intern at the Paul Revere House in the North End, and conducted research on the female Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson. Photograph by Michael J. Clarke.
She’s also channeled Allison’s passion for busting myths and seeking out lesser-known facts—including the strong likelihood that Revere never said, “The British are coming!” because most colonists at the time identified as British.
Working at the historic site sparked an aha moment for McCue as well. She first fell in love with history as a fifth grader when she portrayed female Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson in her school’s “living museum.” She was able to cap her college experience by learning more about a special connection between Sampson and the renowned patriot.
Using a combination of primary source documents and digital records, McCue delved into Sampson’s service and life after the war. Because of her gender, Sampson was initially denied a military pension. Few people know that Revere used his influence to help change that, says McCue.
“He wrote to a politician and described her as ‘a woman whose character and conduct deserved respect and whose suffering entitled her to compensation,’” says McCue, whose original research about Sampson, gender, and Revolutionary memory will appear in The Revere House Gazette. “And she did get her pension.”
“Nell would have spoken at Faneuil Hall, organized meetings at Faneuil Hall, and he would organize the Crispus Attucks Day celebration at Faneuil Hall,” says Quigley, who often works from the iconic building. Nell’s focus on Attucks and other Black patriots brought attention to the fact that nearly a century after the War of Independence, the quest for liberty remained an ongoing struggle.
“You see that Revolutionary rhetoric from a lot of abolitionists. It was a way to publicly claim part of the founding of the nation, claiming citizenship when you know simultaneously, conversations [about enslavement] naturally are about the denial of that citizenship.”
History is essential to Boston’s economy, but also to something bigger: building a shared understanding of the past and vision for the future. As presentation methods evolve to excite new audiences—visitors can now interact with an AI-enabled holographic Frederick Douglass at the MAAH, for example—storytelling remains paramount. Which stories are told, how they’re framed, and why all matter.
The Freedom Trail itself began as an exercise in marketing during the Cold War, explains Allison. Joining 16 historic sites—a mix of private and publicly owned (and at the time fiercely independent, even competitive) properties—to create a manageable tour of Boston history was a difficult task. But it was critical to promoting a sense of national identity.
“This is a way of showing the distinctiveness of American society. Freedom is our real brand,” says Allison.
Looking beyond the 250th to Boston’s 400th anniversary in 2030, and onward into the distance, Allison is, as ever, tempted to find context in the past to explain history’s enduring relevance.
“Problems we have [today] have new manifestations but are similar to problems faced back in the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire, or Mesopotamia. People over millennia have grappled with these various ideas and various problems,” he says. “History, and the humanities, offer us a window into what’s better.”
By Andrea Grant and Erica Noonan