Living History

Boston is where the whole business of being American began, so it’s not surprising that the country’s oldest historical society is located here, in an 1899 Colonial Revival-era building at the intersection of Hemenway and Boylston. This is the Massachusetts Historical Society’s seventh home, and it suits them. Even the lobby oozes old new world charm. Lisa Krassner, the organization’s newest president, leads me up the spiral marble staircase into a hallway lined with gleaming colonial-era furniture to an elegant circular chamber that looks out on a corner of the Emerald Necklace and the Fenway’s endless construction projects.

Over tea and a basket of breakfast treats, Krassner explains that Mass Historical was founded just 15 years after the Revolution by Jeremy Belknap, an energetic clergyman whose life’s work was a rigorously researched three-volume history of New Hampshire. The book sold poorly, but would come to be appreciated many decades later, even earning praise from the worldly French diplomat and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who analyzed the character of our young republic in his runaway bestseller “Democracy in America.”

Belknap’s other major pastime was composing a who’s who dictionary of distinguished Americans. His networking with notable people resulted in an impressive collection of documents and objects that he and nine of his friends thought worth preserving. Others of Belknap’s mindset continued to enrich the collection over the ensuing years, and today Mass Historical is a priceless gem—a library and archive with more than 14 million manuscript pages, along with books, maps, photographs, newspapers, paintings, and decorative arts. There’s also stunning exhibition space, extensive public programming, and a robust online presence with searchable databases of information.

“In 1791, our name was simply ‘the Historical Society,’” says Krassner. “We were collecting the nation’s history.”

It’s an eclectic collection full of surprises, spanning several centuries of the country’s great—and not so great—moments. As one might expect, the archive contains national treasures such as the personal papers of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams. But there are also items documenting stories deserving of wider recognition, such as a portrait of Elizabeth Freeman, an African American woman who sued for and won her freedom from slavery in 1781, a landmark case that led Massachusetts to outlaw slavery two years later. There’s plenty of diverting side trails off well-worn historical paths: for example, Paul Revere’s first-person handwritten narrative of his ride to Lexington and his capture by the British, Cotton Mather’s pocket watch, and a wistful 1917 photograph of the last horse-drawn streetcar in front of Old South Church.

“Old things tell stories,” Krassner says. “They’re imbued with meaning. We don’t think of these items as relics. They’re relevant to our lives today.”

There’s also an enormous amount of “everyday history” in the collection—accounts of ordinary lives recorded in family papers, diaries, and photographs, all deep undercover sources for historical sleuths.

Krassner and her staff are eager to share these items, and the stories they tell, with as many people as possible.

A Life in Museums

Krassner is exuberantly qualified to raise MHS’s profile. She has spent her career at some of the East Coast’s most lauded cultural institutions, shaping how those organizations attract and treat visitors. Self-effacing and sharply observant, she seems unfazed by large-scale challenges, tackling them with a practical approach grounded in empathy and common sense.

She grew up in South Florida, the daughter of two culturally hungry New Yorkers. Classical music concerts and visits to museums were the norm, alongside scavenger trips to flea markets with her father, an antiques dealer who specialized in estate jewelry. When she was only five, her parents took her to the groundbreaking 1977 “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum.

“I remember feeling completely transported,” she says. “All those gorgeous sarcophagi.”

At 16, Krassner was accepted to the exclusive international United World College program. A BA from Bryn Mawr and an MBA from Simmons followed. Early stints at the Unitarian Universalist Association and GBH convinced her that nonprofits were the right fit.

In 1999, she took a job at the Museum of Fine Arts and stayed for 13 formative years, playing a part in the planning and opening of the new American Wing and contemporary art galleries. As Senior Director of Visitor Experience, she introduced a training program called “The Fine Art of Service,” which put the visitor’s needs first.

“There was this notion that some staff didn’t deal with the public. We changed that. If you were in a public space inside the museum, you were responsible to the visitor,” says Krassner.

She demonstrated that simple changes had a big impact on visitor satisfaction. For example, having museum guards walk lost visitors to their destination rather than just pointing down a hallway, and ensuring “handoffs” of visitors from one staff member to another were handled gracefully, with friendly smiles. The program’s recommendations are still followed today.

In 2012, she left for Manhattan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked alongside two of Boston’s current museum heads: the MFA’s Pierre Terjanian and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Peggy Fogelman. There, she helped steer a major rebranding effort and streamlined the museum’s complex membership program.

By 2019 she was COO at the Museum of Natural History, managing a 400-person staff and more than 1000 volunteers. When the pandemic hit, Krassner had six months to strategize and execute massive changes to systems that had been in place for decades. They even opened a vaccination center in the iconic Hall of Ocean Life.

“We helped 100,000 New Yorkers get their COVID shots under the big Blue Whale,” she says, smiling. “How awesome is that?”

Back to Boston

When the Executive Director position at Massachusetts’s Concord Museum opened up in 2022, Krassner jumped on it. Though she loved New York, it was time to come home. “I just feel like Boston is my city,” she says.

Krassner set to work building the museum’s profile. There was no strategic plan, so she started one. She got the museum re-accredited. And she began planning for Concord’s 250th anniversary in 2025.

“Concord had an exciting opportunity to lead the story because of the first battle at the North Bridge, the famous ‘shot heard around the world.’ We created a rich array of programs and three exhibitions over an 18-month period,” says Krassner.

In 2023, the Museum’s 250th‑anniversary exhibitions and published catalog of the American Revolutionary War collection won Krassner and her colleagues the Decorative Arts Trust Prize for Excellence and Innovation. Not long after, she secured a $5 million gift, the largest donation the museum had ever received. Last spring, USA Today named the Concord Museum one of the best small-town museums in the country.

“We were firing on all cylinders. It was exciting. And then Mass Historical reached out and said, we have an opening. Are you interested? I said, yes!”

Cutting Through the Noise

Krassner calls Mass Historical’s curators “stewards of history.”

“I think the way to capture hearts and minds is really through storytelling. People do have a lot of distractions these days, it’s true. But they’ll also binge watch a Netflix program for hours on end,” she says.

Faux history costume dramas like Bridgerton rack up fans easily enough, but making real history relatable for broad audiences takes a special gift.

In their March “Object of the Month,” a regular MHS website installment about a collection item, the curators hit the mark with a playful gloss on a 1792 poem written by one Jonathan Plummer, a tinker from Newburyport who was perpetually unlucky in love.

The poem, entitled “Unrequited Love in the Time of Smallpox,” is dreadful, but its literary quality isn’t the point. Plummer’s story of love and loss is totally cringe, as Gen Z might say, and it’s wittily and clearly presented. Everyone knows a Plummer. Many have been in his shoes.

Krassner agrees that history needs to resonate with people to stick. “I think people want an emotional connection. People will always stop in their tracks for something that’s really interesting or beautiful or complex to understand it better.”

Krassner is adamant that history is a living thing, with useful lessons to teach us if we have the ears to hear them. As Boston heads into a year of 250th commemorations and celebrations, there is no better time to listen to voices from the past.

“History education is not about nostalgia and civics education is not about partisanship. I mean, there’s real reasons we do this work,” she says. “During the Revolution people had to figure out what it meant to go from being a British subject to being an American citizen. Now, 250 years later, we’re at another very polarized time in our history. I think it’s important to look back at the values that we built this nation on and think about what it means to be a citizen of this country. How do we find common ground? How do we value one another and our differences?” she asks.

One way to explore these questions is to visit “1776: Declaring Independence,” Mass Historical’s thought-provoking exhibit about the Revolution, which examines private letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts to reveal how the Declaration of Independence evolved over time.

The exhibit showcases texts that influenced popular thinking, such as “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine’s masterful indictment of tyranny, and John Adams’s “Thoughts on Government,” which outlined how to build a new republic from the ground up. There’s also the famous letter from Abigail, the other half of the Adams power couple, asking her husband to “Remember the Ladies,” who had little legal recourse if their own husbands proved tyrants.

On display are several rare drafts of the Declaration, one of the history’s most audacious and radical documents. Each version’s differences demonstrate shifts in thinking, as the founding fathers argued and reworked their vision of this brave new world. These are words that actively shape our lives today. Consider Adams’s late June 1776 copy and Jefferson’s copy, too, which had a passage denouncing slavery as a cruel war against human nature itself. The Continental Congress took that part out, and millions of men, women, and children would suffer in bondage for nearly another century before emancipation in 1865.

The “1776: Declaring Independence” exhibit, which runs until mid-December of this year, is an absolute must-see, but that applies to so much of Mass Historical’s collection. Krassner underscores that anyone can engage with the organization, and everyone is welcome in the library. Seeing a specific item requires an appointment, but anyone can make a request. Visiting the library is free, as is much of the programming.

“In the reading room, you can find a Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar sitting next to a high school student. We have something for everyone—we want our visitors to discover that special something that stirs their curiosity.”