Revolutionary Words Tour: A Literary Walk Through the Writings that Inspired Independence

Before the battles, before the Declaration, before the nation, there were words: speeches, pamphlets, poems, essays, broadsides, and public arguments that helped shape how ordinary people understood liberty, power, rights, resistance, and revolution.

That’s the experience of the Revolutionary Words tour. As we walk through downtown Boston, we’ll explore the places where revolutionary ideas were printed, spoken, debated, read aloud, and carried into the streets.

On this tour, you’ll learn about Boston’s role in the American Revolution through the literary voices who helped create the language of independence. We’ll visit sites connected to the Liberty Tree, Benjamin Franklin, Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, Phillis Wheatley, Isaiah Thomas, Paul Revere’s Boston, and more.

Along the way, we’ll read revolutionary-era words in the places connected to them: poems, speeches, newspaper writings, and other texts by Sam Adams, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and others that reveal how language helped move Boston from protest to revolution.

You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of Boston’s Revolutionary history — not only as a story of battles and politics, but as a story of language, print, persuasion, poetry, and public imagination.