The Lowell Experiment
320 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
15
Paperback
Release Date:23 Aug 2006
ISBN:9781558495470
The Lowell Experiment
Public History in a Postindustrial City
University of Massachusetts Press
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 Lowell's new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and women's history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public history—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 rituals—all serving to locate the park'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 Lowell'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 "culture-led re-development," 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.
The book focuses on Lowell National Historical Park, the flagship project of Lowell's new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and women's history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public history—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 rituals—all serving to locate the park'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 Lowell'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 "culture-led re-development," 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.
I am very, very impressed with this book. . . . The writing is graceful, precise, revealing a host of complex issues rather than covering them up with verbiage. . . . It is one of the best case studies in the world of public history I have yet read, and a very important story to tell. . . . I think this book will be very well received and widely reviewed.'—Edward T. Linenthal, author of Preserving Memory and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory
'This is the best thing I have read on the politics of public history in a long time. . . . Stanton has very fresh insights on the relationship between urban real estate developers and progressive public historians, and on what she calls 'rituals of reconnection' through which middle-class industrial historians and their middle-class visitors use places such as Lowell to connect with their grandparents' working-class backgrounds.'—David Glassberg, author of Sense of History:
The Place of the Past in American Life
'[The Lowell Experiment] is thorough, superbly researched, and engagingly written. '¦ Stanton has produced a study of the highest quality, one that should be read by both aspiring and practicing public historians. It should be a required text in introductory courses for public history and historic preservation graduate programs, as it will prepare students for the intense, contentious, multivocal, and politically charged world of history in the public realm.'—The Journal of American History
'This ethnographic study of Lowell's public history demonstrates care for a community in flux as well as respect for (and critique of) local knowledge and public memory. Stanton's scholarship is informed by participation in public history and, in turn, her analysis and reflection can help inform that very public history. . . . Stanton's clear, compelling prose provides a model for anthropological study of one's socioeconomic equals. . . . There is much to recommend in this book.'—H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences
'Cathy Stanton's book offers historians a novel approach to the practice of their craft. . . . Stanton sets forth insightful criticisms of the dangers inherent in the heritage gambit of history for developmental purposes.'—Technology and Culture
Cathy Stanton is an adjunct faculty member at Tufts University and Vermont College of Union Institute & University.
