Boston Common

This guide to Boston Common follows Mary Dyer, a Quaker twice banished from the colony under a law that made her faith a capital offense, as she walks back into Boston in May 1660 knowing exactly what the magistrates have waited to do. It traces her first close call on this same green a year earlier, when officials pulled her off the scaffold at the last moment, and her decision to return a third time to challenge the law rather than evade it. Listen for how the crowd that once gathered here has been replaced by joggers and picnic blankets on the same stretch of grass.