Bruce Schulman, BU’s William E. Huntington Professor of History, who teaches History of Boston, introduced his students at Club Passim, which he rented for their final presentations of the semester. Photos by Rich Barlow

Student Life

BU Class on History of Boston Takes to a Storied Stage: Club Passim

Renowned Cambridge club a perfect venue for students’ final presentations, focused on the highs and lows in city’s music heritage

History, like music, pulses with recurring refrains. Today’s battle over immigrant rights echoes a controversy, aptly, from Boston’s musical history. Boston University students explained that episode last week on an equally apt, if unorthodox, stage: Club Passim, Cambridge’s iconic folk music venue. 

Beantown’s musical heritage provided the theme for the final projects in this spring’s History of Boston class. One student team focused on the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including the World War I–era deportation of its conductor, Karl Muck, without any evidence that he’d aided his native Germany in the war. That exculpatory detail drowned in a flood of foreigners-damning press coverage, whose headlines the students flashed on a screen: “Dangerous Aliens Face Deportation,” “Alien Enemies Leave Boston Sunday.”

“Muck’s arrest was weaponized by these publications and used to grow a general xenophobic attitude towards European immigrants,” Charlotte Waeschle (COM’28) noted during her team’s presentation. The publicity’s effects rippled, added Shreeya Kulkarni (CAS’28), as “immigrants hid their cultural identities and even changed their names, and German [American] newspaper publications and schools [and] churches declined in attendance or shut down altogether.”

Other student teams addressed the role Arthur Fiedler (Hon.’51) played in in popularizing classical music as conductor of the Boston Pops for five decades, beginning in 1930; the city’s vibrant jazz scene after the Second World War; the question-authority vibe of punk music in the 1970s; and the role of Passim itself as greater Boston’s folk headquarters and launching pad for the careers of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan. After the presentations, the students were treated to a buffet dinner and band: musicians, led by guitarist/vocalist Sean Staples, rocked the house with selections from two defunct local bands, Treat Her Right and Morphine.

Few students get to present on a storied stage for their final projects, or are feted by a concert afterward. Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History at the College of Arts & Sciences, never received musical accompaniment when he was a young history major, either. But in his History of Boston class, students don’t just study the past—they immerse themselves in it. 

And Schulman, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, knows a thing or two about immersive teaching that grabs the attention of students by the lapels. “They never knew that doing history is not just memorizing a bunch of names and dates,” he tells BU Today. Throughout the semester, he introduced students to the city where they study via walking tours and the Passim finale. “One of the most often-stated reasons of entering students here for why they picked BU, is the Boston location. But I think the number one regret of graduating seniors is staying in the BU bubble–‘Didn’t really see much of Boston,’ ” he says.

Schulman knows the manager of Passim and arranged to rent it for the class presentations—which were given before an invited audience of his friends and academic colleagues—while recruiting Staples, whom he had previously seen perform. Since this was a class about Boston and music, Staples chose to play repertoires by Treat Her Right and Morphine, homegrown bands. 

“To my ears,” he says, “they’re two of the best acts to ever come from this area, yet never achieved the visibility of bands like Aerosmith or the Cars. Both groups were also the product of a uniquely Cambridge music scene… I figured a celebration of two incredibly cool yet mostly unknown bands that rose from the neighborhood pubs of Cambridge would be appropriate.”

Like the city it covers, the History of Boston class is always changing. Each year, the course students are assigned a main project with a different theme. Among past topics: the 17th-century King Philip’s War, the Salem witch trials, and the city’s public parks. This semester, Schulman opted for Beantown’s musical heritage, partly as “a form of self indulgence,” he admits 

“I’m a big music fan. I see live music a lot,” he says. Beyond that, “Music was also a way of exploring a lot of other important themes in the city’s history, the development of the public infrastructure and architecture, race relations, class relations,” all of which his students also studied this semester. (The class subtitle is Community and Conflict.) 

During the last class before the presentations, Schulman coached students on prepping for the big night at Passim, suggesting that dressing up wasn’t necessary for a music club—but they shouldn’t dress down too much, either (“Don’t be wearing what you would mow the lawn in”) He also encouraged them to applaud their peer presenters and the musicians. And while it wasn’t required for when he stepped on stage: “You are absolutely permitted to clap and cheer wildly.” 

He has alternated teaching the class with colleagues for about 12 years. A key takeaway—conveyed by tapping into Boston as a living laboratory-—is that history isn’t made only by great forces and people who came before, but by those who study them as well. 

“As historians, we play a key role in determining what the past means,” Schulman says. “History is an ongoing conversation between the past and the present. You might think, well, history can’t change because the stuff happened. But in fact, history is constantly changing, because we are always asking different questions about the past. There are things we never thought to ask of the past that our present causes us to ask, and so people make history in both of those senses of the term.”

Several student teams included references to BU’s involvement in the city’s musical heritage in their presentations, paying homage, for example, to George Wein (CAS’50, Hon.’15). In the 1940s, Wein opened Storyville Jazz Club, which hosted live performances and recordings by countless jazz greats. He also founded the Newport Jazz Festival, still going strong. 

“I loved living in Boston the last four years, so I thought this [class] was a good way to learn a little bit more” about the city, says Minnesota native Nicholas Glomski (Questrom’25). (Bob Dylan hails from Duluth, Glomski notes, giving a small regional bond to his team’s presentation on Club Passim, an early venue in Dylan’s career.) 

“When I think of the history of Boston that I knew before taking the class,” he says, “it was just what I’ve read in books about the Revolutionary War and whatnot. That’s what I think of as, like, Boston history. But I ended up learning a lot about the 1900s civil rights [movement] and all the sorts of ways that music ties into the history of Boston, which I found really interesting.”

The night at Passim provided the coda to the course’s immersion in Boston and its musical history, especially when one of the musicians reminisced to the crowd during the concert about his role in creating a popular local recording studio decades ago. 

Recognizing that the audience included students who weren’t around for the 20th century, Staples cracked, “This is the part of the show where old guys tell you what it used to be like.”