About Making History

Making History is a course designed to involve students in the very activities practicing historians carry out when writing books and essays. In Fall, 2020, led by Professor James Johnson, students immersed themselves in primary source material. This ranged from archival and manuscript sources to historical sites, art, and architecture. Together, these artifacts reveal strands of the city’s identity over the past 400 years.

The course focused on three critical moments in the history of Boston: the 1670s, when a ferocious war broke out between colonists and indigenous peoples; the later 19th-century, when European culture influenced America on the level of the arts and letters and through waves of immigration; and the 1970s, when racial tensions boiled over with court-ordered school desegregation.

This interactive site provides a glimpse into some of the work students accomplished during the semester. The site contains their transcriptions of 17th-century letters written by members of the Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay Colony. It features a virtual walking-tour of the city of Boston, with photos, sketches, and descriptions of historical sites by students. The site also presents summaries of students’ major research projects, with links to the manuscripts, early-print books, and artifacts they studied.

“Philip, King of Mount Hope”, from the Church’s The Entertaining History of King Philip’s War, line engraving, colored by hand, by the American engraver and silversmith Paul Revere

 

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo

 

Stanley Forman, The Soiling of Old Glory