Designated in 1978, Lowell National Historical Park interprets the rise of the Industrial Revolution in New England through the textile industry, its social and environmental impacts, and the legacy of industrial decline. In addition to guided tours, school field trips, and other formal and informal programs, Lowell NHP tells this history in three spaces—the Visitor Center, which provides a broad overview of the park themes; the Patrick J. Mogan Cultural Center, which includes two exhibits, “Into an 1840s Boardinghouse” and the newly opened “One City, Many Cultures”; and the Boott Mills Museum, which includes a weave room featuring live demonstrations of the Draper Model E power looms and exhibits on the rise and fall of the textile industry in Lowell. We are currently planning a major redesign of the exhibits in the Boott Mills Museum to bring the space up to date with current research and interpretation practices.
Currently, the exhibits at the Boott Mills Museum are divided into roughly six sections. The first two sections provide information on the textile industry’s connection to American slavery, early textile mills, the “founding fathers” of Lowell, and the shift from agriculture to industry in the area and as a national debate. A theater space plays a video featuring interviews with former mill workers. Section three (the largest section) focuses on the technology and working conditions of the mills in the 19th century; it includes several machines involved in the production of cotton cloth, a miniature of the factory system, and a few interactive elements. The next two sections turn toward the end of textile production in Lowell and its migration to the American South and later the Global South. Exhibits here are spare but include a world map with magnets inviting visitors to investigate their tags and mark where their clothing comes from, an interactive video that explores working conditions and choices available to workers at different points in time, and items produced in the mill buildings in later years. A final reflection space asks visitors to post notes sharing their own stories “of working in America” along with two large paintings and three quotes from key Lowell figures.
The exhibit redesign will seek to provide a more accurate and inclusive history that provides opportunities for interactive, critical engagement with historical narratives of progress. This project is also part of a parkwide initiative to increase community engagement and create more opportunities for the co-creation of meaning. The visitors to Lowell NHP tend to come from outside of the immediate community, and many of the park staff will attest that Lowell residents are often unaware that they live in a national park. The development of the “One City, Many Cultures” exhibit began to address both of these challenges in the form of a community roundtable, a diverse committee of Lowell residents who took an active role in the design and implementation of the exhibit.
I come to this project as a former resident of and education & interpretation park ranger at Pullman National Historical Park in Chicago, which was the company town and railcar manufacturing center of the Pullman Company. Like Lowell, the emphasis of the historical narrative is the establishment and rise of the industry. Much of the interpretive programming and displays focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries with little attention given to the decline of rail travel, its subsequent impact on the Pullman Company, and the changes the emptying out of the factory made on the neighborhood. That period is largely skipped over by park interpreters and its community partners in order to bring focus back onto a new era of progress: the grassroots efforts to save the neighborhood from demolition and achieve city, state, and eventually federal historic designations.
In addition to that experience, my degree and academic work is in the field of literary criticism, which trains my focus here at Lowell on the difficulty of breaking out of the narrative paradigms so often tied to industrial histories or labor histories. As economic narratives, they heel to the peaks and valleys of economic activity measured in profit and production, the size of a labor force, and the scope of the market. As historical (chronological) narratives, they pitch to the key of progress. If the exploitation of factory labor necessitated unionization and strikes, the emphasis is on the unity of the workers and whatever gains might have been achieved by labor actions. These narrative paradigms frame the history according to the principles of capitalism, whose characters are always and only economic actors and whose stakes are always tied to economic production. The postindustrial community, then, can only be interpreted in relation to its industrial past, and since the industrial era is marked as a milestone of progression, the evacuation of a particular industry is all too often, and all too quickly, interpreted as a decline without the same level of nuance afforded to stories about the industrial period.
As we begin to imagine an entirely new exhibit space, the question is how we break out of this narrative paradigm to open up spaces for multivariate or heteroglossic interpretation. The answer must go beyond opportunities to share personal stories of work or elicit emotional responses or to inject the narrative with a greater diversity of characters, though these remain important elements of effective interpretation. In concert with these interpretive practices, we need to include narrative framing as part of the interpretive experience. This would require the exhibits to be somewhat modular so that visitors could explore the history through a variety of narrative frames and use the museum experience to investigate the power of narratives to shape our understanding of a particular moment in history. It will also require a consciousness of language to avoid imposing evaluative narrative rhetoric into interpretive text. Using narrative framing as a methodological approach has the potential to highlight parts of Lowell’s history that have been marginalized. I’m eager to hear from others about their thoughts and idea on this approach and how it might take shape in concrete ways.
The first purpose-built national historical park (not a military site) was Colonial Williamsburg, which with certainty promoted a triumphalist patriotic narrative. Lowell NHP is not immune to a similarly selective interpretation of industrial capitalism in the USA. But, although commodification is its core, the principles of capitalism are not only economic, nor are we only economic agents; the commodification of life has only been achieved through a combination of manufactured consent, violent dispossession, and bribery. Those political and ideological factors are often omitted from standard NPS interpretations, which is, after all, an agency of the state. (The A250 initiative may facilitate some corrective opportunities.) Regardless, history and other interpretations are never neutral or value free, nor are competing interpretations equally valid. They are inherently political (who controls) and ideological (according to what world view); either can be quite messy.
Wow – what an opportunity and a challenge here Sarah. In this short space, I can’t begin to offer a significant amount of specifics. “Glocalization” might be a theme to consider – how Lowell was, and remains, part of a global system of commodity and labor flows, and what are the reasons and forces that drive those flows? What are the effects and legacies that remain behind once systems change or leave? How have past narratives elided elements of these flows in favor of what Joseph Corn once noted the “sweetness of technology”? Just some ideas. Is this an opportunity to reestablish those community connections that went into “One City”? Could they have some insights? Hope we can talk more and puzzle through this with you.
Your emphasis on narratives, particularly the narrative of progress, offers a helpful way to situate the flow and ebb of local industry within a broader context. I believe the narrative of progress that underlies much current interpretation of industrial history stems in part from the booster rhetoric that was prevalent in many communities in the early 20th century.
When I mentioned our working group recently to a colleague in Polish-American history, he suggested we consider the Polish city of Lodz. Its history of textile manufacturing might offer an interesting comparison with Lowell. As in Lowell, capital accumulated in Lodz, attracted labor, and led to the city’s rapid growth. In view of your background in literary criticism, you might be interested in Wladyslaw Reymont’s 1899 novel The Promised Land and its depiction of conflict between factory owners and workers in Lodz. It’s available in English translation. (Reymont is best known for his four-part novel series The Peasants, 1904-1909.) Director Andrzej Wajda adapted The Promised Land into a 1974 film with the same title. Wajda’s film contains one of my favorite movie scenes, which I’ve used in class to address industrialization and class conflict.
Sarah, I don’t have a lot of feedback to add to your thoughtful analysis. I wonder whether a narrative structure of the consequences of deindustrialization in Lowell would work within your ideas? That’s something we’re trying to address in High Point but our efforts are only in the initial planning stages. As a native of the area, I can’t wait to keep following what you do!
Sarah, wow! This is such a thoughtful analysis of how we navigate these spaces at several vital levels/stages. In addressing some of your concluding ideas, I thought back to some of my latest exhibit trips. What I am noticing more in the Chicagoland are self-guided tours that connect across exhibits on general themes. Such as at the Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Museum. While I am not entirely sold on the idea, I do think they provide a degree of flexibility in making use of existing content. And as Greg notes about the technological aspect, I do wonder, with the growth in free programs like CLIO, if this is an increasing possibility for how we can create a way around this. Really fantastic contribution. Cannot wait to dissect what this could mean for our working group later today!
This case presents fascinating possibilities, and your focus on reshaping narrative frameworks and structures as exhibit methodology is key. If there is an intentional shift away from the inherent binary structure that frames narratives of progress against narratives of regress, narratives of prosperity against narratives of disparity, or narratives of innovation against narratives of either exnovation or stagnation, among others, then there is the potential to reframe a narrative of the postindustrial that considers “post” as dynamic rather than static.
What happens if narrative framing of the postindustrial is not necessarily located in the questions of before/after but during?