My practice in the public history and archaeology of urbanism in the U.S. includes archival and field research exploring urbanization of the trans-Atlantic world during the long nineteenth century. Foundational to that modern history is the commodification of social relationships, which Lowell MA amply demonstrates.
As in many treatments of industrial heritage in America, the interpretation of Lowell has turned on stories of personal insight and fortitude – perhaps mirroring intellectual self-perception and the habitus of global capitalism. We have heard about Messrs. Francis Cabot Lowell, Kirk Boott, and James B. Francis, as the owners and managers of industrial capital, through hagiographies that sometimes draw on apocryphal stories and pass quickly over any uncomfortable details. Alongside those of the great and good are stories that fetishize capital technologies of industry: gearings, camshafts, turbines, computers.
Conversely, we hear relatively little about the lives and imaginations of thousands who actually built and sustained that industry beyond generalizations of “mill girls” or “immigrants.” Less is said about the trans-Atlantic economy in which industrialization took place, the herding of populations to service capital, the dispossession of Indigenous societies in the Americas, Africa, and beyond, and the enslaved labor compelled to produce its raw materials.
Consequently, a major task of public history in Lowell is and has been to complicate “just-so”’ histories and to enable the revelation of the social relationships through which some of these moments can be understood – as dynamic, lived experiences. Complicating history is not simply a matter of piling on factoids – although much history remains undiscovered and to be revealed. It is actualized by way of dialogic inquiry, so that “visitor”’ cross over to conceptualize their own places within the continuums being interpreted.
Joining complication with dialogism has required re-envisioning the engagement process and re-envisioning the heritage being engaged. New program types that are more intentionally conversational and participatory, often led by non-NPS volunteers, and through which visitors are invited to co-direct with questions and shared experiences. Lowell Talks – community conversations rather than formal presentations – and Lowell Walks – site specific walking tours typically led by avocational historians and storytellers – have linked past and contemporary problems and perspectives, such as sexual harassment, gender discrimination, housing insecurity, environmental justice, criminalization of immigrants, and other elided histories of the marginalized and disadvantaged.
Exhibition projects have widened the analytical frames and sought to raise previously under-examined questions and subaltern histories. The long-term exhibition One City, Many Cultures, for example, attempts to portray a wide range of lived experiences in Lowell. Co-created over more than four years by a committee of 30 volunteers and with the active involvement of more than 80 other community members, their personal stories, heirloom objects, photographs, and other items, are the exhibition. Narratives of elected and forced migration, of rebuilding community, of resistance to social and personal adversities, and other stories that may enable park visitors to find community with those who they might otherwise have viewed as “others.”
Educational programs, particularly with high school students, have sought to incorporate site-specific experiences in exploring the intersections of industrial and environmental histories. A pilot program with a charter school for “at risk” students merged experimental fieldwork with classroom study of urban ecosystems. A second citizen-science initiative engages high school students in the fieldwork of collecting specimens for a longitudinal, nation-wide study of mercury pollution; an annual program that is simultaneously empowering for teenagers and inspiring to the adult volunteers working alongside them. Exploring the environmental history of the city necessarily joins multiple class-grounded themes and topics – such as the use of mercury as a wood preservative in the later 19th century canal and mill building.
LNHP was envisioned by its organizers in the 1970s as a fulcrum for the economic revitalization of the city. Consequently, much less explored by the NPS are any deleterious effects of its intervention in restructuring the city. The historic resources of the canal network and mill buildings have been subsumed by schemes for adaptive reuse and as objects of heritage tourism. This has facilitated the gentrification of the city. Most of the housing stock in Lowell was built (ca. 1860 – 1940) for an industrial working class population, living in proximity (walking or by streetcar) to the textile mills and machine shops that lined the canals. A great deal of that housing stock remains, but is now priced according to its proximity to the Boston-Nashua business services corridor. As a result, a significant number of working class persons have been priced out of that housing and into precarious conditions. This remains underexamined and uninterpreted by LNHP or NPS.
These are some of the challenges, opportunities, and new types of projects for LNHP and for NPS; themes and practice that may hopefully influence future interpretive and educational programs, broaden community participation, and contribute to positive societal change in Lowell and beyond.
Summative evaluation of these projects is made difficult by government rules (e.g. OMB approval) regarding social research. However, self-completed survey forms collected at Lowell Talks programs during 2019 (n = 161) confirm respondent interest across the range of contemporary topics. Also, the audience during the survey period was overwhelmingly (93%) local to Massachusetts, which suggests that respondents’ attendance was deliberate rather than as a chance encounter (e.g. tourists visiting the park for other reasons). Summative evaluation of the One City, Many Cultures exhibition was approved in 2023 for contracting but as far as I am aware that contract has not been let. There has never been a structured evaluation of Lowell Walks tours.
One City, Many Cultures was acknowledged for “excellence” by the New England Museums Association in 2023, and featured as “best practice” by the NPS Harpers Ferry Center since 2021. LNHP educators and interpreters have presented on these projects at multiple professional conferences, including NEMA, NEHA, AAM, and NCPH.
Kevin, this is really fascinating to me on many levels. I can envision many places doing a similar project like One City, Many Cultures, as a way to engage at multiple levels, the histories of sites and the cities. (Like Akron, for example!) I’d be interested to hear more on the specific structures and work put in place to create the community/museum dialogues to start – how can places replicate what might be a difficult/awkward/sensitive process?
I’m very interested in the concept of dialogic interpretation, particularly as it’s connected to Mikhail Bakhtin’s book, Dialogic Imagination. Here, Bakhtin conceives of dialogism as the essential feature of the novel as a literary form. Contrary to other scholarship, which views the novel’s language and style as a rhetorical expression, primarily the voice of the author, Bakhtin sees the novel as a unique stylistic space made up of “a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other” (47). Novelistic discourse, as he describes it, transforms all language and forms of expression that appear within the novel’s pages into an object, with which the author is in a dialogic relationship. Rather than speaking through a literary medium, the author of a novel represents language, “argues with it, agrees with it (although with conditions), interrogates it, eavesdrops on it, but also ridicules it, parodically exaggerates it and so forth” (46). A sonnet that appears in the pages of the novel, for instance, cannot be taken directly as a sonnet written by the author, but as the image of a sonnet. In other words, because it has been inserted into the literary environment of the novel, it takes on the added layer of being a representation of a sonnet, rather than a real one–a fish on display in a bowl, rather than freely swimming in the lake. I think Bakhtin shows that there’s more to dialogic interpretation than conversation between and among interpreters and visitors. How can we think of interpretation as a form of novelistic discourse, as Bakhtin explains it? And how might that open new opportunities to address challenges of representation?
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1981.
Like Greg, I found that the concept of the One City, Many Cultures exhibit really resonated with me. An exhibit at the Packingtown Museum, the People of the Stock Yards, has a similar theme and has been one of the most engaging topics; the human aspect really makes visitors feel empathy, and on common ground, with the families and individuals that are featured.
I also appreciated your mention of the impacts of urban “renewal” and gentrification being overlooked in the interpretation of your site, along the lines of the issues that Fayge brought up in her case study; very necessary to address these issues in both instances, as the stories of the people who lived and worked there is a key element of the history of the places themselves.
Kevin, throughout this group’s discussions, your case statement and your just-published book chapter have served as a sort of keystone for me because they lay out these issues so well. I urge all to read your chapter, “The Gentrification of Working-Class Heritage in Lowell, Massachusetts,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics (Routledge, 2024).
I take your point about “stories that fetishize capital technologies of industry: gearings, camshafts, turbines, computers.” But I would argue that those tools, machines, and products are essential in interpretive work that follows the model you’ve described. In the lobby of the Plant, home to the Packinghouse Museum, I had a moment of personal connection when I saw a butcher’s block, its once-level surface worn into a concave shape by years of use. That artifact needed no interpretation. its function was obvious: it was a real butcher’s block, not the faux “butcher’s block” finish that was recently in vogue for kitchen furniture. I briefly imagined my grandfather, a Polish butcher from Newark, at work on such a block, and better grasped the story of that packinghouse.
Kevin, thank you for sharing this! The One City, Many Cultures exhibit plays out the scales and block-by-block nuances of heritage and lived experiences. This makes me think of how, in our interpretative acts, we should be ever mindful of scale and nuance. I echo Greg’s statement that this could be replicable for so many other communities and very well can be a way of considering regional stakeholders and cross-community interactions in sprawling metropolitan regions like Chicago but also to accommodate that as the 20th century progresses, that distance between work and home increases. What becomes then the interaction between the two and the working-class communities that navigate that boundary?
Kevin, I think about the mill girls a lot and constantly turn to The Lowell Offering as a vital resource when teaching teenagers about representations of adolescence in imagined spaces. If in the 19th-century adolescence did not exist as such in a broadly agreed upon timeline of human growth and development, then adolescence could not exist in the factory. If adolescence did not exist in the factory, then how is it possible for their stories to exist in the collective space of the magazine? How is it possible for their voices to continue beyond the pages of the Offering? Their stories construct and interrogate senses of self as part of the extraction of labor from their bodies.
It makes me wonder if part of telling stories about the lived experiences of Lowell communities in the 21st-century in One City, Many Cultures can extend into more work with autobiography, autoethnography, and other forms of life writing.