Matthew Wilding is the Director of Education & Interpretation at Revolutionary Spaces, the caretaker for two of Boston's most historic buildings, the Old State House and Old South Meeting House. We talk about their new interpretive ventures--plays, immersive games, walking tours, and exhibits, and about public history in Boston. Matt Wilding discusses new ways to interpret history, including immersive games and comics, such as the "Free Hands" series he has created based on the Golden Age of Piracy.
Matthew Wilding is the Director of Education & Interpretation at Revolutionary Spaces, the caretaker for two of Boston's most historic buildings, the Old State House and Old South Meeting House. We talk about their new interpretive ventures--plays, immersive games, walking tours, and exhibits, and about public history in Boston. Matt Wilding discusses new ways to interpret history, including immersive games and comics, such as the "Free Hands" series he has created based on the Golden Age of Piracy.
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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome to the Revolution 250 podcast.
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I'm Bob Allison.
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I chair the Revolution 250 advisory group.
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We are a collaboration among 70 or so organizations in Massachusetts looking at ways to commemorate the beginnings of American independence.
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And our guest today is a 20-year veteran of the world of Boston tourism and public history, Matthew Wilding, who is the Director of Education and Interpretation at Revolutionary Spaces.
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Great to see you, Matt.
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Thanks so much for having me, Bob.
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So, Revolutionary Spaces has a lot of interesting programs you're doing, commemorating things.
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You have this new exhibit, Impassioned Destruction on Politics, Vandalism, and the Boston Tea Party.
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Maybe we can start with that.
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Yeah, I would love to start with that.
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So, our new exhibit, as you just mentioned, is called Impassioned Destruction.
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We decided to take kind of a new spin on telling the Boston Tea Party story.
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There are, you know, there are and have been dozens of
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exhibits and interpretations of the Boston Tea Party throughout the city.
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And they usually are about the rebellion over the Tea Act and how it leads to the American Revolution, which is an important story to tell.
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We decided to talk about it through kind of a more modern framing about the act of vandalism and particularly the act of property destruction as a way of protesting things.
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So we tell the story of the Boston Tea Party as it unfolds in its immediate aftermath.
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For some listeners who may not know, it was not super well received in the immediate aftermath, people like.
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Ben Franklin and George Washington are publicly denouncing it.
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And it remains something of an embarrassment for a number of years until really the 1830s.
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It's kind of rebranded as the Boston Tea Party.
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Yeah, it was called the Destruction of the Tea before that.
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It wasn't this happy event.
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We all agree it was a great thing.
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Yeah.
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Right, and yeah, then you just kind of hit the main point, right?
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Is our decision to agree that it was a great thing comes 40, 50 years, 60 years after the fact.
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And with that framing in mind, we decided to explore with the other half of the exhibit,
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some other instances of property destruction in the name of protest, some of which are not well received or well remembered, and some of which are just kind of completely forgotten.
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So we have instances like the Stamp Act riot of 1765 here in Boston, the Ursuline Convent fire, which is when a group of men in the 1830s raided the Ursuline Convent.
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Charlestown and burned it down.
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The Weather Underground's bombing of Gulf Tower in 1974.
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The Reading Railroad strike in the late 19th century in Reading, Pennsylvania.
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And of course, we end it with January 6th, which really in a lot of ways was the kind of
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seed of the exhibit.
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And you and I actually talked about it when I was working on this exhibit, because I wasn't totally sure how to frame it.
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And I got to say, you were instrumental in my choices.
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Well, yeah, because I think it's important.
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And you're not saying, boy, the Tea Party was a good idea.
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All of these things were good ideas.
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You're just looking at this as a means of protest.
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Absolutely, yeah.
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We actively did not take a side on any of it.
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And we tried to be as politically broad as we could.
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The Weather Underground is arguably the most successful radical leftist organization in American history.
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Of course, the January 6th incident leans conservative or right wing.
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The Ursuline Convent fire is at its core a nativist and anti-Catholic action.
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The Reading Railroad strike is a labor action.
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And the Stamp Act, very similarly to the Tea Act, is a protest on taxes.
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So we took a broad brush.
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And to your point, we really didn't want to say, this is good.
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What we wanted to say is, maybe you should consider whether or not you think the Tea Party is good.
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Yeah, it does seem like early on in the summer of 1773, when Jonathan Clark comes back, there's an attack on the Clark house, which looks very much like the Stamp Act riots, where they demolished Hutchinson's house, Oliver's warehouse, and so on.
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And it almost seems like after that, they're tearing...
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the shingles off the house, someone fires a gun from inside the house and that disperses them up.
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It seems like after that, the proponents of it decide to take a step back and not do that kind of destruction of property that they had done before to turn these guys into martyrs.
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That is not taking that step, even though, as you said afterwards, Franklin Washington say, hey, this was really a bad idea.
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Yeah, no, absolutely.
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The question as to whether or not
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protest in the form of any kind of violence, whether it be against property or against human beings, is a really intensely contested one throughout American history, right from the beginning.
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And, you know, we have another exhibit that opened a few months prior that has a more traditional and socially acceptable form of protest.
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It's a history of petitions.
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Right, yeah, the humble petitioner, yeah.
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Right.
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And the humble petitioner is kind of another option of like, well, these people didn't have the right to vote.
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It's Black folks, women, non-property-owning men, and Indigenous people.
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And so they used this tool that was legally at their disposal.
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But the question of what do I do when my voice is not heard broadens itself pretty dramatically if you use all of the tools that you have at your disposal that are legal.
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Certainly there are
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dozens of examples of petitions and letters and requests to Parliament to stop what is being perceived as unjust here in the colonies.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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And it comes up in the Declaration.
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We also, I think, discussed the tearing down of a baseball stadium.
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That is the ritual destruction.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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In Pennsylvania, there's a, there's a destruction of a park, um, after I believe it's after the athletics leave Philadelphia, but it may, it may be, it may be the Phillies moving to a new stadium.
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We looked into it a little bit and we just couldn't, we couldn't find enough, uh,
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like clear evidence of it being kind of planned.
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But yeah, it appears that, you know, people showed up at the stadium with tools and dismantled it in protest.
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Fantastic.
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I know I first heard about this.
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There was a presentation at the Mass Historical Society on this ritual house destruction in the 1760s, very learned paper.
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And at the end of it, Mary Maples Dunn, who was a very distinguished scholar,
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80s were there.
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And
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I remember Mary Maple Stunt said, well, Richard and I participated in something very much like this.
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And they had gone to that game.
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And then she said by the eighth and ninth inning, people were bringing out screwdrivers and things.
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And so her husband did not come.
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They were graduate students at the time, I guess at Penn.
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He did not come.
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Someone loaned him a screwdriver so he could get one of these chairs out.
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She said it was his hatred about the owner.
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And so this dismantling of the stadium, she saw in this tradition of the –
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protests of the 1760s.
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I guess you couldn't car and feather whoever the owner of the A's was, but you could do something else.
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Yeah, you know, and I think you just hit on the kind of opposite point I'd made earlier about, you know, there's this long history of controversy about property destruction.
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But there's also, it's truly a tradition.
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And, you know, it goes beyond something as simple as a specific political worldview.
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And in many cases, like in this instance in the baseball park, it even kind of jumps past politics.
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It's just a social action.
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Yeah, yeah.
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A lot of politics is a social action.
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It was at one time.
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It's a communal activity and you're building a base and doing these other things.
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So I know Revolutionary Spaces, you've managed two sites, the old South Meeting House and the old State House in Boston.
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And you've also launched a number of new tours of the surrounding area to kind of give a new perspective on what's happening outside.
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Yeah, so our tour season is done for the year, but we'll be back in the spring.
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We have two tours currently running that I think are really exciting kind of re-evaluations of downtown Boston.
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The first one we launched is called Massacre in Memory.
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And we really lean into the subject of one of our previous exhibits, which is still available online, Reflecting Addicts, that Christmas Addicts is one of the five victims of the Boston Massacre.
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Also, of course, the first Black and Indigenous man to die in the American Revolutionary, what becomes the American Revolutionary Movement.
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And that framing becomes an important narrative in the abolitionist movement in the 19th century, particularly as it's led by William Cooper Nell here in Boston.
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And as it turns out, the geography immediately surrounding our building lends itself to telling both of those stories kind of simultaneously.
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Um, you know, the massacre happens outside the old state house, the orations and commemorations of the Boston massacre happened inside the old South meeting house.
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The, um, the revival of those orations, uh, by William Cooper now in the 19th century, uh, happens in Faneuil hall, uh, the sold both the soldiers and, um,
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people who are being prosecuted under the Fugitive Slave Act are held in the same jail that used to be on the other side of Old State House.
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They were tried in the same court right next to the Old State House.
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It's incredible.
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So getting to explore this downtown and not the Freedom Trail packaging, but through a clearer narrative that's hooked onto one thing was really fun.
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Um, the other, uh, the other, the other tour, uh, Boston Reconsidered, uh, explores the historical narrative of Boston past the revolution.
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Uh, we get to talk about, you know, the, the, both the abolitionist movement, gay, uh, the gay rights movement, um, anarchist movements, all kinds of movements that all have roots in Boston.
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So they're great tours.
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I recommend them both.
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Great.
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It's a really such a great location.
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One of the great things about Boston is you can
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these layers of history around.
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Yeah, I mean, and really at a level that I think is not true in any other city in America.
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I mean, Philadelphia makes a reasonable claim to it, but the sheer volume of historical impact that happens within a square mile in downtown Boston with architecture that in many cases still exists is just incredible.
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And even for some of the architecture that doesn't exist, you get to talk about why it doesn't exist anymore.
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And that in itself is fascinating.
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I mean, that there used to be a Hutchinson Street over in your post office square, and then there wasn't anymore.
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And why is that?
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It's just as interesting a story.
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That's actually been one of, for me, the most exciting parts about coming to Revolutionary Spaces and doing the work here is that
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For a long time, I came from the Freedom Trail Foundation.
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As you know, I was a tour guide there, and then I was content director, and then I worked at the Kennedy Institute in Dorchester, among other places.
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But when I came back to Rev Spaces, the interest among the general historical tourism public changed pretty dramatically.
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And a lot of visitors wanted to talk about things that weren't here anymore.
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And the great hook for a walking tour historically is have something to point at, right?
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Whether it's a plaque or a building, have something to point at.
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But the new framing of having something that's missing to point at and then talking about why it's not there anymore, that's been a really fun and kind of refreshing way to talk about things.
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And I think Hutchinson Street is such a great example of that, is when people bring their hands about tearing down monuments.
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And I was just at a family event where family members were talking about tearing down monuments.
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And I was like, you know what?
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We've been tearing down monuments since the beginning.
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I mean, we tore down all memory of Thomas Hutchinson in public eye after the American Revolution.
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There was a town named after him that's now called Barrie.
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That's right, named for Isaac Barrie, who comes up with the name Sons of Liberty.
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Right.
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Meanwhile, we erased the native political figure who we named the town after 11 years prior.
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That's right.
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That's right.
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Yeah.
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The son of Massachusetts.
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Sometimes you see in a book, he was a British governor.
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He was from here.
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His family had been here since the 1630s.
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There's a statue of his great great grandmother in front of the state house.
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So we're talking with Matt Wilding, who is the director of education and interpretation
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a long veteran of Boston's world of tourism public history.
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Now, you mentioned being on the Freedom Trail, and there you portrayed one of these great characters who also was erased at one time, Ebenezer McIntosh.
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Yeah, yeah, I got to play Ebenezer McIntosh for a long time on the Freedom Trail, one of my favorite historical figures.
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For those who don't know, McIntosh was the leader of the South End gang who led riots on what we called Pope Day, November 5th, for all you B for Vendetta fans.
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There's still B for Vendetta fans, right?
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That's still a thing.
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But McIntosh led these gangs that built these effigies that had the Pope and political figures on them.
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And then they essentially fought members of the North End for victory.
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And those two gangs- These guys are all the same, too, right?
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It's all these demographically, politically- Yeah, they're mostly working class kids, yeah.
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Yeah.
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And they're fighting each other to prove, really to prove which neighborhood's better.
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And my understanding of those fights, which I'm sure you have some thoughts on too, but my understanding is that it's essentially sanctioned by the town so that they won't do it all the time, right?
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It's like, there's no police here, so they just need to let them let off steam and they give them a day a year.
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Once a year they do this, yeah.
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But then the redeployment of those gangs and particularly of Macintosh, then the records of this are all so shoddy because it's all secret society stuff, right?
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It's all Sons of Liberty information.
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But what it appears to have happened is that somebody figures out a way to get these two gangs who have been fighting each other for years to march together.
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And they march behind Ebenezer Macintosh.
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And, and ultimately they, you know, they lead the stand back riots in August of 1765, but they continue marching together, you know, well into the 17, the late 1760s.
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It's, it's a really miraculous series of events where someone, you know, probably Samuel Adams, but someone figures out a way to get to broker a peace between these two gangs for political means.
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And they already essentially have military experience because they've been fighting each other for three years.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I mean, they're not in the Corps of Cadets.
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These are guys out in the street brawling with each other.
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Yeah.
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And they know the neighborhoods.
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They know their neighbors.
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There's this great story about McIntosh when he's arrested after the Stamp Act riots.
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He's held in the local jail.
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And I believe it's Sheriff Greenleaf tells protesters who show up to disperse or he'll call out the militia.
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And the people essentially say, we are the militia.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, it really is a shift of power.
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I mean, the Greenleaf always has trouble then enforcing the law because the law is shifting.
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Yeah, and it really does highlight the viscousness of power, right?
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The ability of someone like a sheriff to enforce the law has to do with whether or not he has anybody willing to enforce it
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at a level that can beat the public outcry against it.
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And I guess we still see that, right?
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I mean, again, with January 6th, the willingness of the government to suppress what is perceived at the moment as a semi-popular protest, it was on full display.
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It was really hard to figure out whether or not police should be deployed to stop it.
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Yeah.
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Now McIntosh, within a week, it seems, of the destruction of the T, he is exiled, or he goes off to exile in New Hampshire.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It's hard to say whether or not he was forced to leave, or if he was just sort of priced out of the market.
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He ends up floating around all over the place.
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I believe he ends up walking to Ohio at one point, too.
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At one time, yeah.
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He has a son out in Ohio.
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He walks out there.
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This is
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when he's in his 60s, just taking that long walk out to Ohio and back.
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Yeah, there's actually a plaque to the colony in Ohio right across the street from the State House on State Street.
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These people just essentially can't afford to live here anymore.
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It's another problem we can all identify with, right?
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Can't afford to live in Boston anymore.
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So they moved to Ohio.
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Because he's one of the guys who is on the list to the
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Monroe and Macintosh the ones that the order comes maybe these guys should be arrested and uh he's spirit and it's unclear again as he said these are murky records these are secret societies we don't have anyone saying what's going to happen but here is Ebenezer Macintosh's uh is it you know the Patriot side or the loyalist side that tells him you know that it would be better if he didn't come back or is it just as he could be priced out because he's a poor guy
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Right, well, yeah, I mean, certainly it's not safe for him to live here during the occupation, but it appears that he leaves before the second occupation of Boston.
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And yeah, he also doesn't seem particularly welcome by the 1770s by people like John Hancock and Samuel Adams.
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He'll go on to brag and suggest that he was deeply involved in things like the Boston Tea Party, even though he very clearly is not here anymore by 1773.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So, interesting character.
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I think the Tea Party Fips Museum says they just marked his grave up in, I think, Haverhill, New Hampshire, where he's buried.
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But it's the wrong name on the grave.
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It says Philip McIntosh.
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Is there another grave?
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I may be wrong about this, but I think there may also be another grave in Vermont that some people think is his.
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Because the Haverhill, Newbury, up on the upper Connecticut were kind of twin towns.
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yeah i was just gonna say i hadn't i haven't looked into the the the most recent scholarship on where everybody died yeah you've been doing other things and you were more interested in ebenezer mcintosh live today
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Yeah, yeah, as a rioter, a fascinating figure and just one who, you know, in the modern world, thinking about what it would be like to live in a town that is, you know, being, you know, put under siege by an angry mob.
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I've gotten to really explore a lot of emotions with him as a 20-year-old and then again as a 40-year-old.
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Now that you're a property owner in Boston, you probably look at this much differently.
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Right, yeah, I absolutely do.
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And I'm sure, you know, we haven't mentioned yet, but I was a student of yours years and years ago, and I was always a loud mouth radical in your class.
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And you always said you'd win me over and I'd calm down as I got older.
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And you were right.
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Well, you know, when I was your age, then I was also a loud mouth radical.
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So I didn't know how things often go.
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So anyway.
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You've also, by the way, in addition to doing interpretation and doing these exhibits, you also created a couple of comic series, or I guess they're called graphic novels, so freehand.
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Oh, I call them comics.
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Okay, thank you.
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That's great.
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It's a crazy rebranding.
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Comics aren't embarrassing.
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Yeah, I'm currently writing a pirate series based on the history of piracy in Boston called Freehands, which was really deeply influenced by a class I actually took at Southern University with Stephen O'Neill on piracy.
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But I just got really interested in the relationship between a pirate named William Fly, who was executed in Boston in the early 18th century, and Cotton Mather, who is a prominent preacher here in Boston and also in Salem, involved in the Salem Witch Trials, seemed to get a taste for executing pirates when he came back to Boston in the early 18th century.
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And William Fly is this fascinating character at the very end of the golden age of piracy who appears to get on a ship in one of the Carolinas and then oversee a mutiny and take over this ship and break all of the rules, the accepted rules of piracy.
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You know, pirates at their core
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in their most idealistic versions, as seen by people like Black Bart Roberts, have these codes, right?
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There are pirate codes and there's rules because these men are trying to be free in an oppressive world.
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And one of those rules is you don't impress sailors.
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uh because the idea is that pirates are free uh one of one of those the other reasons for that though is a practical one uh some sailors particularly ones with specific skills like navigators uh can really put you in a in a bad place if they're not um if they're out there of their own free will and uh fly impresses a navigator who brings him into boston harbor
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and subsequently his entire crew is executed for piracy.
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But Fly refuses to repent when he's dragged in front of Mather's congregation.
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And so this kind of dance between the two of them goes on for months where Fly refuses to repent so his soul isn't saved and so he can't be executed.
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And then finally, there's this really kind of public, really high public event execution where Fly is finally executed and makes this really fun and brilliant pirate speech where he says that his only regret is that he doesn't have more time to kill more Captain Greens.
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Captain Green is his captain.
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And more Cotton Mathers.
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And then he gets hanged.
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And my understanding is it's the last time that Cotton Mather oversees a pirate execution.
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But that story just lends itself to kind of an almost usual suspect-y crime mystery.
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And so I've created a crime mystery to tell that story.
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That's great.
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And how many issues are there?
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Currently, the second one is actually on its way out this month, and then the next one will be crowdfunded probably in January or February.
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But you can check out stuff, updates for that at sequentialdecay.com, which is the publisher.
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Okay, very good, sequentialdecay.com.
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and you uh now do you do the illustrations or do you have no i'm useless in that regard i'm purely a writer uh the art is done by a gentleman named matt roe who is a actually a canadian uh illustrator who i've been working with for a number of years he and i did
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a book called Nightmare Man a long time ago, which was based on a kind of urban legend about a guy who tried to abduct children when I was a kid in the 90s.
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And we also did a short story called Little Things
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which was about another urban legend about a man who was released from an insane asylum in the Massachusetts suburbs in the 1990s.
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Because Massachusetts in the 1990s is full of great spooky myths about people coming for your children.
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It is, yeah.
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And I think, you know, you're also then dealing with a lot of these myths of the time of the revolution, the age of piracy.
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I mean, there's these great stories we have.
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So is it a temptation for you as a historical interpreter to embellish or to share the urban legend and say, well, this is what people used to think?
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Yeah.
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No, I think there's always the temptation, right?
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I think that's really the difference between the work I did as a tour guide and the work I do now in a museum.
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Tour guides, in a lot of ways, it's a show, right?
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You're selling an experience for people who are mostly on vacation.
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If you've got a school group, it's kind of a different thing.
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But people are looking to have fun, and so you can throw some qualifiers in and embellish some stories.
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uh certainly you know the story of cotton mather and william fly has been embellished by many many people uh over the years uh when i'm in when i'm doing museum work i try to you know stick to sources and and not not try to not not put too much of a spin on things um but balancing between them honestly is why i think i end up gravitating towards um the two different fields and and not be able to stick in one of them because you know sometimes you want to explore and have fun
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In a lot of ways, honestly, I feel like I learned that from you, that telling a story is important and getting the hooks in people to care about history.
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The way I started caring about history as a young person,
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wasn't you know a history class uh it wasn't you know it wasn't that i you know read about reconstruction in the ukraine and was like well i gotta know more about this it was he was reading actually he was reading comic books he was reading uh frank miller's 300 uh which is about the battle of thermopylae and uh reading torso by i believe it was uh brian michael bendis which is about the torso murders in cleveland um you know different historic pieces of historical fiction or historical reinterpretation through graphic art
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And then playing video games like Age of Empires and Civilization.
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And the starting point of a hook that has a basis in history is, in my experience, how most people start caring about this stuff.
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And then if they want to know more, they get into the weeds.
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But there's nothing wrong with starting with the Killer Angels or John Adams by David McCullough.
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I'm sorry?
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Yeah.
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McCullough, yeah.
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Yes, Dave McCullough.
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Or, you know, the John Adams miniseries on HBO, which is based on that book.
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Or, you know, getting obsessed with Oppenheimer after you saw the Oppenheimer movie.
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Or Assassin's Creed, which goes through this building.
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You can walk around this building in Assassin's Creed.
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Yeah.
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You know, there is, I mean, I think that's true that we have these hooks or these things that can get people engaged in the story in a lot of different ways.
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And then, you know, it's up to them.
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I mean, I
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I could give a lecture about the revolution, but actually engaging someone in that level is actually a lot more valuable or a lot more visual.
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Revolutionary spaces, you actually have the opportunity to be in the place where these debates and discussions happened at Old South Meeting House.
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I mean, you're in this space, and I know that you've been using these for dramatic presentations of things.
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Yeah, we actually have a play running right now called Phyllis in Boston, which is getting great reviews, and it's a fantastic show.
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It's in Old South Meeting House.
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It's running through December 3rd, and it tells the story of Phyllis Wheatley, who was a member of the Old South Meeting House back in the 18th century.
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She was an enslaved woman who wrote the first published collection of poetry by a Black woman in America.
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And as it happens, just a fascinating coincidence, the first edition of her book arrives in Boston on the Dartmouth in November of 1773 alongside the tea.
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And so she has this actual economic and social interest
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in this ship that is in the midst of this crisis.
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So it's a great story.
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Uh, it's, it's, I think the fourth or fifth play, uh, the organization was done.
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If you include the Bostonian society days, um, yeah, we did blood in the snow, which, which activated the, um, the, the council chamber at old state house in the aftermath of Boston, Boston massacre.
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Uh, we utilized, uh, a door that was owned by John Hancock, uh, on his house for Kato and Dolly.
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Uh, we did the petition, which was about, uh, slavery, anti-slavery petitions, uh,
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and emancipation petitions.
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There's been really great, again, great embellishments that tell a story better than just the raw documents sometimes do.
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I had a teacher once who said about
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Arabian Nights, and it always stuck with me.
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I learned more about the Middle East reading Arabian Nights than I did spending two years in the Middle East.
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And that always stuck with me.
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It wasn't that it wasn't important to go there, but he probably wouldn't have gone there if it wasn't for reading Arabian Nights.
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That's true.
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That's true.
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Yeah, and so the Phyllis in Boston plays by Ade Solanki, who's a playwright based in London.
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fantastic playwright yeah and she she did another play called phyllis in london uh that caught our eye and so we we commissioned her for an original play and so the world premiere was a couple of weeks ago right here at old south meeting house i can't emphasize enough that folks should come to that play um it's it's on weekends including on on thanksgiving weekend but it's also on wednesday and thursday nights um it's it's a fantastic play we also have uh
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two school day school day matinees.
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The first one I believe is sold out and it's tomorrow, but we have another one on the 28th.
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So if you have students who want to go, you can contact us to bring your class.
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Great.
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We're talking with Matt Wilding, who is the director of education and interpretation.
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historian of Boston and the revolution and other things.
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And I mean, you have had an interesting career where you've worked at, you know, you've done consulting work for the Ronald Reagan library and the Ted Kennedy Institute, you know, Ted Kennedy, of course, Senator from Massachusetts, but you dealt with people from a wide range of, you know, political persuasion, a wide range of points on the political spectrum.
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I wonder how that, how that informs what you do when you're putting an exhibit together.
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Yeah, it's a really good question.
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It's the most fun about this work, actually.
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It was really strange having worked at the Ted Kennedy Institute for four and a half years and then getting picked up by the Reagan.
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There actually is less difference than I think most people would think.
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Most educators and most museum professionals don't let political agendas get into their work too much.
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And we still get accused of it, no matter what we do.
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But I don't think my approach changed dramatically writing programming for the Kennedy than writing programming for the Reagan.
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So for context, at the Kennedy Institute, I worked on a game called the Senate Immersion Module, which was a two and a half hour immersive experience for up to 100 students to create legislation.
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We worked with both Democratic and Republican Senate offices to create that program.
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And then we also did historical theater pieces called Great Senate Debates.
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At the Reagan, I worked on a revamping of their immersive education program on presidential leadership, the Discovery Center, and we built it on a historical event, the downing of KAL 007, which was a Korean airline that appears to have been shot down by the Soviet Union.
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And then I got to actually, I got to make another game here at the Revolutionary Spaces at the Old South Meeting House that is also built around the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party.
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And I think getting to do work at the Kennedy and at the Reagan
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really primed me to be able to do a game here where we we we made sure to write perspective the differing political perspectives in the 18th century uh and we included a really broad base of people who aren't usually included so uh you know both free and enslaved black folks women but also for me most importantly british subjects in britain uh because the perspective on on the boston tea party by rank and file people in in england is actually a really important
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that we never talk about in the States.
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And honestly, I genuinely think that that came from getting to actually sit down with like John McCain's office when I was in my late twenties and have them spell out their point of view on immigration reform or the farm bill.
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And then working with conservative Republican historians at the Reagan and getting a point of view that I didn't necessarily see.
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It's a learning process to answer your question.
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I don't know everything about most of this stuff.
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And I actually gravitated towards a lot of conservative historians in college, both in undergrad and grad school, despite my more liberal leanings as an individual.
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Because they give perspective, right?
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They make us think about things in ways we don't necessarily think about them.
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And what is good to study history if not to just think about things a little bit differently?
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I think one of the most valuable lessons we learn is that we don't know everything.
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I'm still working on admitting that to myself.
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Well, take it from me.
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We've been talking with Matt Wilding, who is the Director of Education and Interpretation at Revolutionary Spaces.
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I know we could go on all day, but I know you actually do have two museums to oversee.
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I do.
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Anything else we should talk about that Rev Spaces is doing?
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Yeah, I just want to mention the kind of grand finale for our year is, of course, the reenactment of the Boston Tea Party and the meeting of the body of the people.
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The December 16th event has actually sold out, but we're actually doing another one on the 15th, so the Friday beforehand.
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There's still a handful of tickets left for that.
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So if people want to come and celebrate and commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party with us,
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I can't emphasize enough what a good time it is.
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I know you've gone a couple of times.
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Yeah, you want to tell us what it is?
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I mean, so this is an immersive thing where you're participating in this meeting.
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Yeah, so we have colonial costumed people really ultimately reenacting the meeting that leads to the Boston Tea Party on December 16th, 1773.
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Last year we revamped the script a little and we added some characters who are not welcome in the meeting.
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And I think we did it in a way that didn't feel forced.
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We clarify why it is they're there and how they're not allowed in the meeting.
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We made Phillis Wheatley kind of the voice of God narrator throughout it because of her connection to both the books and the building.
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um but yeah we get to you get to you get to really participate in the town meeting that leads to one of the most important historical events in american history and then at the at the end there are opportunities for people to speak out and take on other characters uh who were involved and we had we had a really good time with that last year people got really engaged in it and then we'll march over to the harbor and and watch the folks at the boston tea party ships dump the tea into the sea
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So that event's incredible.
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It's been going on for years.
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One of Boston's great historical traditions.
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On the 14th, we'll also have a civic event.
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We're going to be honoring some people for their civic work.
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Announcements are going to be going out about that this week.
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But that's going to be great, too.
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That's going to be freed up in the public.
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Wonderful.
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Very good.
37:37.525 --> 37:45.250
We've been talking with Matt Wilding, Director of Education and Interpretation at Revolutionary Spaces, a longtime Boston cultural leader.
37:45.942 --> 37:48.504
a veteran of our tourism public history world.
37:49.084 --> 37:50.325
It's been great talking to you, Matt.
37:51.165 --> 37:51.565
You as well.
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It was great to see you, Bob.
37:53.106 --> 37:53.546
Yes, thanks.
37:54.147 --> 37:58.329
And I want to thank Jonathan Lane, our producer, and our many listeners around the world.
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You know, Matt, when we started this, we thought, you know, a handful of our friends might tune in.
38:02.483 --> 38:06.385
But we have listeners, actually, so every week I thank people in different places.
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If you're one of these places and want some of our Revolution 250 stuff, Jonathan has just made up a new batch of playing cards, other things.
38:14.509 --> 38:17.371
Sent him an email, jlane at revolution250.org.
38:17.471 --> 38:21.873
So this week, Riverside Park, New Jersey, Long Beach, California.
38:22.629 --> 38:31.842
Knoxville in Cordova in the state of Tennessee, and two of the W towns here in Massachusetts, Walpole in Weymouth, and Rishon LeZion in Israel.
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Thanks all for listening in all places beyond and between.
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And now we will be piped out on the road to Boston.