[On March
5th, 1770, the events of the Boston Massacre unfolded on King’s
Street. On March 5th, 2020, the Northeast MLA convention
will begin in Boston. So for both the Massacre’s 250th anniversary
and that ongoing convention, this week I’ll highlight some historic sites and
collective memories in Boston!]
On three media
that have contributed to our collective memories of the Massacre.
1)
Pamphlets: As you might expect from the era that
gave us Tom
Paine and the Declaration being distributed
instantly to read aloud, rapid-fire political pamphlets became a weapon of
choice for both sides in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath. The colonists had A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in
Boston and its sequel, Additional Observations to A Short Narrative,
which gathered depositions from numerous witnesses (or at least alleged
witnesses) to make the case against the British soldiers. Royal Governor Thomas
Hutchinson produced his own pamphlet, A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy
Disturbance in Boston, which used contrasting depositions gathered by
Hutchinson’s agents to tell an alternative story. I don’t imagine that any of
the texts in this pamphlet propaganda battle did much to sway supporters of the
opposing perspective, but at the very least they provide a compelling set of
contemporary accounts of the events in King Street and their collective
interpretations.
2)
Engravings: By far the most famous such
propagandistic portrayal of the Massacre was a visual one, however. My weekend
Guest Posters will have more to say about the propaganda behind the famous Paul
Revere engraving, which is so mythically remembered that it turns out it
wasn’t even initially created by Paul Revere—his was apparently a copy
(famously published in the Boston Gazette)
of an artistic
rendering by the young artist Henry Pelham (John Singleton Copley’s
half-brother). And as that last hyperlinked story indicates, there were at
least a couple other contemporary engravings that entered the image competition
around the same time, muddying the waters of artistic originality and
collective copying yet further. For an event so dependent upon different and
competing histories and collective memories, it’s only appropriate that the
visual representations became a multi-vocal conflict in their own right, a
battle to determine whose rendering became and remained the definitive
portrayal.
3)
Memorials: Both the pamphlet and engraving
battles unfolded in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath; precisely because of
those and many other heated and contested histories and stories, it took far,
far longer for any more permanent commemoration to be constructed. Indeed, it
was not
until 1888 that a memorial
was erected on Boston Common, the same time that the Massacre’s five
immediate casualties were reinterred beneath a new gravestone in the city’s
historic Granary
Burying Ground. Given that these two historic sites are now prominently
located on the Freedom Trail and at the heart of tourist Boston, it would be
easy for visitors to see them as longstanding commemorations, rather than the
more recent additions (and thus reflections of the gradual collective embrace
of the Boston Massacre participants) that they are. Which is as good a reminder
as any both that memorials are themselves contested expressions of collective
memory, and that we need to study and analyze them just as much as we might
learn from them.
Last site
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sites and collective memories (in Boston or anywhere else) you’d
highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment