Time is a viscous fluid, and occasionally it sticks to places, leaving the residue of certain centuries attached to the edges of buildings, or to markers on the streets, or to the insides of tourists’ heads. In Boston that clinging moment is the colonial period and the American Revolution. When tourists think of Boston, they think of Puritans and patriots, of minutemen and Paul Revere. The Freedom Trail, Boston’s most famous historical tour route, takes visitors to pre-1776 spots: the site of the Boston Massacre, the Old North Church (of “one if by land, two if by sea” fame), and a half-dozen cemeteries filled with dead Mathers. The tourist business booms in the spring and summer, when visitors throng Faneuil Hall, a colonial city hall turned shopping center; Plimoth Plantation, where a “living museum” re-creates life in 1627; and Boston Harbor, where costumed interpreters re-enact the Tea Party several times a week. You don’t even need to be a tourist to trip over the seventeenth-century milestones that poke out of the city’s brick sidewalks.

This single-mindedness is unfortunate, however, because it obliterates the memory of the time when Boston last took the nation by storm, which was not the American Revolution but the Civil War. When I arrived in the city as a college student three years ago and took a few American history courses, I began to notice this omission in the way Boston bills its history. The more I read about the Civil War, the more of it seemed, contrary to what I had learned in high school history classes, to have taken place in Boston. No battle was fought near the city, but Boston was the center of some of the most vocal protests against slavery and of the most enthusiastic support for the Union cause. Massachusetts freed its slaves in 1783, and it wasn’t long before a large (and literate) free black community began to grow in Boston, offering support and lodging to fugitives headed for Canada.

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