De-centering from the Center: Boston and the Problem of Colonial American History

The historical experiences of Boston, Massachusetts in the century and a half prior to U.S. independence are, in modern times, often closely associated with the narrative arc of United States history.   From Governor John Winthrop’s supposedly prophetic description of his new colony as a “city upon a hill,” to the development of the egalitarian “town meeting” form of local government, to the city’s prominent position of leadership in the resistance movement that led to revolution (the Stamp Act riots, the Boston “Massacre,” the “Tea Party,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”),  colonial Boston’s history is commonly understood to have an implicitly teleological relationship with the development of the United States.  This paper draws on  material from my forthcoming book, The City-State of Boston, 1630-1865, to argue that this teleological synecdoche of colonial part for national whole does violence to our understanding of the history of both Boston and the United States. 

            By showing how the interests and the historical trajectory of Boston related to those of the early United States in an incidental and conflicted way, and by demonstrating how the unity of Boston and the United States was constructed polemically and retrospectively within the context of the sectional crisis that led to the American Civil War, this paper aims to recover a narrative for the history of Boston in which the national narrative is not a necessary culmination but rather a tragic foreclosure of the prospects forged by this Atlantic city-state in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  In doing so, it aims to highlight the limitations and blind-spots of national narratives as forms for framing the past, and offers one possibility for an alternative approach