The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City

The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City

In the early nineteenth century, Lowell, Massachusetts, was widely studied and emulated as a model for capitalist industrial development. One of the first cities in the United States to experience the ravages of deindustrialization, it was also among the first places in the world to turn to its own industrial and ethnic history as a tool for reinventing itself in the emerging postindustrial economy. The Lowell Experiment explores how history and culture have been used to remake Lowell and how historians have played a crucial yet ambiguous role in that process.

The book focuses on Lowell National Historical Park, the flagship project of Lowellâ€™s new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and womenâ€™s history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public historyâ€”a field that links the work of professionally trained historians with many different kinds of projects in the public realm.

The Lowell Experiment takes an anthropological approach to public history in Lowell, showing it as a complex cultural performance shaped by local memory, the imperatives of economic redevelopment, and tourist ritualsâ€”all serving to locate the parkâ€™s audiences and workers more securely within a changing and uncertain new economy characterized by growing inequalities and new exclusions.

The paradoxical dual role of Lowellâ€™s public historians as both interpreters of and contributors to that new economy raises important questions about the challenges and limitations facing academically trained scholars in contemporary American culture. As a long-standing and well-known example of â€œculture-led re-development,â€ Lowell offers an outstanding site for exploring questions of concern to those in the fields of public and urban history, urban planning, and tourism studies.

Country	USA
Author	Cathy Stanton
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9781613762325
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	University of Massachusetts Press
Manufacturer	University of Massachusetts Press
NumberOfPages	324
PublicationDate	2013-01-31
Publisher	University of Massachusetts Press
ReleaseDate	2013-01-31
Studio	University of Massachusetts Press

The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City

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