In April 2025, the Leventhal Center will mark the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War with a new exhibition, Terrains of Independence, in our gallery at the Central Library in Copley Square. Terrains of Independence poses a central geographical question: what was it about Boston and Massachusetts in the last half of the eighteenth century that made the region such a tinderbox for Revolutionary activity?

Many of the most recognizable and iconic sites of the American Revolution are found in Boston and the surrounding region. From Boston Harbor and Dorchester Heights to the North Bridge in Concord, the map of Massachusetts is densely dotted with locations crucial to the story of the eighteenth-century political crisis which boiled over into war and ultimately gave rise to a newly independent nation. For this reason, not only is the history of the Revolutionary period closely associated with the geography of Massachusetts, but, conversely, the cultural identity of Massachusetts is stirred together with Revolutionary history. For residents and tourists alike, the tricorn-hatted tour guides in Boston Common, the well-trod brick path of the Freedom Trail, and novelty sachets of East India Company tea at Logan Airport souvenir shops immediately conjure a recognizable image of Boston’s Revolutionary history and geography in popular imagination.

Behind those familiar items, however, lies a more serious—and difficult—historical question. Why did so many of the most important events in the American Revolution, especially in the years leading up to war and during its immediate outbreak, take place here in Boston and Massachusetts? Was it sheer chance, or was something else at play, something that would help us better understand how and why the thirteen British colonies chose to mount an insurrection against the Crown and establish a democratic republic?

Maps provide an excellent starting point for working towards an answer. And, as it happens, one of the most significant historical collections of maps and geographic materials relating to Boston and Massachusetts in the eighteenth century is located right here at the Boston Public Library.

Patriotic people or the power of place?

Terrains of Independence challenges traditional narratives of the American Revolution that exalt larger-than-life historical figures like Samuel Adams or Paul Revere—central characters in the national mythology of the war—and instead focuses on the geographic factors that shaped Boston’s revolutionary ferment. The exhibit treats maps as tools for uncovering the deeper “where” questions of revolutionary history, rather than as static backdrops for well-worn stories of patriotic fervor.

For example, we can examine the catastrophic frontiers of contact and violence between European settlers and Native peoples throughout New England which shaped the military and political terrains of power and conquest leading to the Revolution. Captain Cyprian Southack’s 1737 map of the New England coast illustrates how Bostonians were drawn into Britain’s campaign to overtake French Acadia, becoming players in a regional drama of colonial domination, resource extraction, and shifting borderlines—a drama which would ultimately lead to discontent with Bostonians’ place within the empire.

Maps allow us to explore the geography of Boston’s maritime trade economy, which made it a relatively prosperous colonial outpost in the early eighteenth century but also left it particularly vulnerable to shifts in British mercantile policy that began to take shape in the 1760s. Emanuel Bowen and Robert Sayer’s map depicting the Americas at the end of the Seven Years’ War shows New England in the context of a hemispheric system of exchange that came together on Boston’s wharves, knitting together tropical plantations, enslaved people, local investors, and European treasuries in a system of tense interdependence.

The shape of the city itself also helped to determine how the early months of military conflict in the Revolution played out. The British officer Richard Williams drew his Plan of Boston, and its Environs in 1776, a map which shows how Boston’s unique peninsular location—surrounded by water on three sides—made it a crucial launching point for troop movements to Cambridge, Charlestown, and Dorchester. We can complement these maps with archaeological artifacts and eighteenth-century objects—including bricks, spoons, powder horns, and more—that demonstrate the material, lived reality of Bostonians during the war.

By emphasizing how physical landscapes and spatial dynamics influenced the trajectory of revolutionary activity, the exhibit calls us to rethink the familiar story of Boston as a “cradle of liberty.” It was not a mythical city that magically infused citizens with the charge of independence, nor the accidental location where abstract ideals of liberty and self-government spontaneously ignited. Instead, Boston was a place where geography and environmental conditions were critical to shaping the events that unfolded in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Scales of inquiry

Terrains of Independence uses maps and objects to reveal how different scales of geography shaped people’s experiences during the Revolutionary era. Starting with broad maps of empires and territories, the exhibition gradually zooms in to the region, city, and landmarks, showing how global conflicts and local landscapes together shaped the course of revolutionary change in Boston. The maps in the Leventhal Center’s collections for this period range in size from hand-drawn plans of forts and battlements to vast depictions of the western hemisphere, and within this exhibit they become active tools for understanding how place matters in historical events.

At each scale, the exhibition moves beyond familiar stories about famous leaders and military strategists. Instead, it prioritizes the stories of people whose actions and experiences fueled growing political discontent, public protest, violence, and intense decision making at various scales. From the wide view of imperial struggles to the intimate spaces of homes and battlefields, these personal stories show how revolutionary events touched different people in radically different ways. By connecting large-scale geographic forces with individual human experiences, the exhibition offers a richer understanding of why Boston took center stage in the early stages of the global phenomenon of the American Revolution.

Rethinking the anniversary

As the nation celebrates the 250th Anniversary of the Revolution, Terrains of Independence invites viewers to see the Revolution in Boston as a profoundly place-based story—and to extend this geographical thinking to revolutionary events elsewhere. After all, the people who took part in the Revolution, and whose lives were willingly or unwillingly shaped by the war, did not already know that a new nation called the United States lay in the future. What we now think of as the familiar cartographic outline of the U.S.A. meant nothing to anyone in 1770. As we look back, we must place ourselves into the geographic settings in which people actually lived, fought, labored, traded, struggled, and more. In the exhibition, we treat these sites, and the maps that depict them, as not merely the backdrops but the terrains of a profoundly consequential moment in local, national, and global history.

Terrains of Independence dovetails with an ongoing digital project led by the Leventhal Center and the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon: American Revolutionary Geographies Online, or ARGO. Like the exhibition, the ARGO project invites scholars and the public alike to consider the Revolutionary era in a new light. The exhibition and programs and will draw from the many institutional collections gathered in ARGO, and visitors will find further digital resources on ARGO to explore these topics in greater depth.

Terrains of Independence opens in April 2025 at the Leventhal Center Gallery at the Central Library in Copley Square. We invite members of the public to join us for our opening reception on the evening of April 9.

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