Fire insurance maps might not sound particularly interesting or relevant to students. But these maps contain heaps of information about cities and towns across the country. This session will demonstrate that these maps — and the Leventhal Center’s powerful Atlascope tool — can support robust conversations with your students about change and continuity in technology, commerce, culture, and community within urban environments.

In this virtual workshop, learn how to mine these maps and Atlascope to support your teaching.

Maps are on seemingly every other page of textbook chapters about the American Revolution. Troops move, colonies become states, and transformations occur before a student’s eyes.

But how do we use these maps effectively with students instead of seeing them as one less page to read? How do we get past this is here and that is there and this used to be some place else? This workshop will explore the rudiments of maps, identify elements of interest to students, and practice some foundational strategies for teaching.

Teachers will also become familiar with the ARGO (American Revolutionary Geographies Online) database, along with items from the Leventhal Center map collection. We will tackle map reading skills, identify whose voices are and aren’t represented, and practice building curriculum activities to introduce maps as primary sources in the classroom.

It happened between what was then King Street and Quaker Lane on March 5, 1770. In this virtual workshop, we will consider multiple views from historic maps to understand how this event unfolded the way it happened because of where it happened. Explore the specifics of Boston’s geography acted as a pressure cooker leading up to the massacre, the chaos of the moment itself, and the concentration of fury in its aftermath.

Learn how maps can aide your teaching of this seminal event in American history. Educators will leave this workshop with primary sources and teaching strategies for using them with students.

Join LMEC Head Curator Garrett Dash Nelson for a special sneak preview exclusively for educators of our upcoming exhibition, Terrains of Independence. In this exhibition maps will offer the entrypoint to a reconsideration of the Revolutionary War through the lens of locality and place.

The exhibition will be on view at the Leventhal Center through January 2026 with special guided experiences for K-12 students available.

In a fictional 1773, Johnny Tremain walked the streets of Boston. In reality in 1942, Esther Forbes used her extensive knowledge of the geography of colonial Boston to create an accurate world around her young protagonist to move through.

This workshop pairs this classic text with historic maps to connect students with Johnny Tremain and the very real world around him.

More information to follow