It’s hard to imagine, but less than 200 years ago, Boston was surrounded by water. The city was basically an island, connected to the rest of the state only through a tiny spit of land. Neighborhoods like Back Bay and parts of the South End didn’t exist until Bostonians dumped landfill into the water over the course of decades.
“The city is so different from the one we know today,” said Garrett Dash Nelson, president and head curator of the Leventhal Map & Education Center located in the Boston Public Library’s central branch. He’s also the co-curator of the exhibit called “Terrains of Independence.”
The exhibit features more than a dozen maps of Boston, New England and the Western Hemisphere made before, during and after the American Revolution. They tell the story of how Boston and its landscape made the region a power keg for revolutionary ideas…