School visits help bring Revolutionary history to life

History Slam Actors, clockwise from bottom right:: Valerie Foxx as Phyllis Wheatley; Dennis Hickey as Jonas Hartwell; J. Archer O'Reilly III as General Henry Knox; Dan Moylan, drummer; Alex Rittershaus as a British soldier; Robert Allison as John Rowe; Doug Quigley, fifer.History Slam Actors, clockwise from bottom right:: Valerie Foxx as Phyllis Wheatley; Dennis Hickey as Jonas Hartwell; J. Archer O'Reilly III as General Henry Knox; Dan Moylan, drummer; Alex Rittershaus as a British soldier; Robert Allison as John Rowe; Doug Quigley, fifer.Revolutionary War fever broke out again on Dorchester Heights recently. In a well-upholstered parlor, three men wearing tri-corn hats were munching quiche and coffee cakes while engaged in a discussion about rumors of Revolutionary War re-enactments and questions of historical accuracy in the exploding tourist trade of Boston.

“I have heard tour guides make things up as they go along,” said the first.

“Very often, these characters are repeating what someone has told them to say, without caring if the source is reliable or not,” said the second.

“There are a lot of apocryphal stories floating around out there,” said the third.

At that moment, a large man wearing Continental Army uniform strode into the room.

“Gentlemen, a high-ranking public official gave a speech at this year’s Evacuation Day Ceremony, in which he made the claim that General George Washington and 6000 troops were stationed at Dorchester Heights,” he said. “This is incorrect. The fact is that there were 2500 troops, commanded by General Thomas. General Washington was nowhere near Dorchester Heights: he was in Cambridge at the time, directing preparations for crossing the Charles to drive the British out of Boston.

“But the cannons positioned on Dorchester Heights forced the British to withdraw without a fight. So Washington never attacked the city – and it’s a good thing he didn’t, because that would have been a disaster,” he said.

As the conversation continued, more people arrived and readied themselves to step out of time as colonial-era Bostonians. They are all part of “History Slam,” an historical/educational/theatrical troupe that takes history into local classrooms with actors who have done the research and know the roles being played.

History Slam is an annual event; that morning, they performed in front of six hundred students at three different schools. I tagged along for the visit to the second graders of Saint John Paul Academy.

The kids were hooked the instant they heard the fife and drum sounding “Yankee Doodle” in the hallway. Then the group marched into the classroom single file: the fifer; the drummer; General Henry Knox, Commander of Artillery, Continental Army; Oliver Smith, a British soldier; John Rowe, British-born Boston merchant; Phyllis Wheatley, famous poetess; and, Jonas Hartwell, Harvard College student from Concord; with two 1812 Marines from the U.S.S. Constitution formed the rear guard. After greeting the students, each came forward individually to bring history to life.

The fifer and drummer played and told how they led the army with their instruments; how the fife and drum broadcast signals that were indispensable to marching and a vital means of communication during times of battle. It was dangerous work done by boys too young, or men too old, to fight.

General Knox addressed the students with a salute, having mistaken the school’s dress code (blue T-shirts) for the uniform of a local militia unit. The General talked about dragging the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights. He disclosed that the code name for sneaking the cannons into Boston was “Saint Patrick.” It turns out this name is also connected to the day that the British departed for good: March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, also known around here as Evacuation Day.

Oliver Smith, a regular soldier in the British army, came out with scruffy beard and wig askew, crying that he was having a bad day. He complained of tenting on Boston Common for two years, while the British army laid siege to the city; all the while enduring insults and abuse from the colonists. Then he pulled a harmonica from his red coat and surprised everyone by wailing blues rifts.

Jonas Hartwell had stayed at school while his three brothers served in the rebel army. After the war, he was sent abroad, to enlarge the family fortune by acting as a merchant with our new Spanish trading partners. Forgetting that he was no longer at Harvard, Hartwell made a disparaging remark about the Pope, and was arrested for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition. Attempts were made to secure his release through diplomatic channels. Nevertheless, the pardon came too late and Hartwell perished in a Spanish dungeon.

John Rowe (Rowe’s Wharf) spoke of his role as a businessman and insider to the levers of power. As for the Boston Tea Party, he said, “I merely wondered aloud how the tea would mix with seawater.”

Controversy over the Tea Tax had stalled the delivery of ships carrying tea. One ship, The Beaver, floated in Boston Harbor for months, unable to dock. On board with the tea were streetlamps that Rowe had financed in a scheme to improve public safety. The streetlamps were prevented from being offloaded, along with another important cargo: newly printed books of poetry written by a freed slave who had gone to London to publish her work.

At age seven she was captured on the coast of Senegal and made the Middle Passage. On July 11, 1761, she disembarked in Boston and took a place along the dock to be sold in the slave trade. The first name, Phyllis, was taken after the name of the slave ship that brought her to Boston, and the last name, Wheatley, was taken after the family who purchased her. One of the students asked Phyllis what her real name was.

“I don’t remember,” she answered in a quiet voice.

From this point on, the actress held the audience in the palm of her hand as she recounted the events of an extraordinary life.

It’s hard to believe that this random assortment of historical personages could make any sense, but it does. History Slam has reality because it suggests a complexity very much like the way we live everyday, all jumbled up and overlapping one another in different, sometimes very surprising, ways. You need only watch their faces to know that the students respond to this: open and thoughtful, they engage with the performers and imagine themselves to be talking to real live people.

Framing questions that give rise to things never noticed before, the students waken to their connection with the past, and realize that they are part of the story being enacted now. Caught up with the drama, the students are drawn into the action: they are looking for similarities with which to develop empathy; they are trying to discover who they are and how they can participate – and they are having fun doing it.

History Slam holds a key that unlocks the doors of perception for a young person’s mind. Teaching from books, we lose the power of story, and learning is more about facts and less about people and the threads of existence that make the fabric of life.


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