Boston has a lot of history – so much so that some of it begs to be erased.

Take Fenway Park, for example.  Alongside that hallowed little bandbox runs Yawkey Way, a block-long street renamed in 1977 to honor Tom Yawkey, who owned the Boston Red Sox till his death eight months earlier.  Under Yawkey, the Red Sox were the last major league team to recruit a black ballplayer, a stain on the team and its city that the current Sox owners would like to erase.

But in a City Hall hearing this week, reactions were divided.  There’s no doubt that Yawkey was racist – Jackie Robinson, who received a “sham tryout” with the Sox in 1945 was quoted at the hearing as calling him “the biggest bigot in baseball” – but especially in later years he also became a major benefactor of medical research in Boston, through the family foundation he established.  “Yawkey Way was named for a man who was not perfect,” said a former Sox employee who now sits on that foundation’s board.  “But like all people, he grew to be a different person.”

Just across the Charles River, another institution this week took a similar step to burnish its relationship with history.  The final stanza of Harvard University’s alma mater calls for students to be heralds of light and bearers of love “till the stock of the Puritans die.”  But while Puritans did indeed found the school in 1636, its student body is no longer so defined by those Yankee roots.  This year, the song seemed particularly dated this year as Harvard inducted its first majority-minority freshman class.  But even in 1888, it was said to have reminded a young W.E.B. DuBois that he was “in Harvard, but not of it.”

No more:  thanks to the university’s committee on inclusion, “Fair Harvard” from now on will urge peace “till the stars in the firmament die.”  They, presumably, should outlast the Puritans.

But in Boston one need not go back four centuries to find uncomfortable history.  After Massachusetts voters in 2014 upheld a decision to allow resort casinos, a brash Steve Wynn charmed state and local officials, and his firm was awarded a monopoly of sorts to build the single Boston-area casino.  But now, as the Wynn Resorts casino rises on the banks of the Mystic River, allegations of “rampant sexual harassment and misconduct” by its namesake have dethroned Wynn from his own company, leaving many Boston residents horrified at the thought that the Wynn name will soon loom above the Boston skyline.

But would Wynn Resorts agree to renaming their jewel in the making?  Perhaps.  “We are absolutely considering a rebranding of the project,” Robert DeSalvio, the new president of Wynn Resorts, told the Massachusetts Gaming Commission this week, “and we’ll have an announcement of that at a later date.  It’s under active consideration right now.”

If you’re keeping score, that’s one down and two to go.  But as one Harvard professor said this week, “I think that history is important and that it should not be neglected,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “That doesn’t mean that it defines us today.”

Update (Apr. 27):  In a hearing before the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, Wynn Resorts announced that its $2.5 billion casino would be named “Encore Boston Harbor.” A day earlier, the City of Boston accepted the proposal by abutters and renamed Yawkey Way to Jersey Street.