The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City

As I mentioned in a previous short review, I grew up in Lowell. I stayed there through high school graduation, served in the Air Force, and then came back to get my degree from the University of Massachusetts/Lowell. I entered the Foreign Service after getting the degree, and never went back to live there. However, my interest in Lowell has never abated, and I think Cathy Stanton's work is an excellent addition to understanding the totality of Lowell, yesterday and today. I will add that Ms. Stanton's book struck me as a Ph.D dissertation, so forewarning the reader beforehand, this is not a fast moving suspense thriller. :-) I appreciated so much of the information Ms. Stanton included in her work, it filled in very many gaps I had in understanding some aspects of the city I thought I knew so well. I wholeheartedly recommend Ms. Stanton's book for those who want to dig into "the mechanics" of what made ... and makes ... Lowell an interesting city.

arrived in fine shape

needed the book for class.

Hard to read!

It is a great case study for anyone in the museum field to read.

This book contains some basic insights, because the potential collision between the mythos (and economic value) of "heritage" and the higher meaning of history and the human experience in industrial sites (among others) needs to be understood.But the actual insights of this author compared to the longstanding awareness of the issue by the people and the public historians and "heritage developers" at Lowell and other national park service "partnership parks" is really one dimensional. Because there is a fear by the closeted historian that cultural landscapes may be abused by promoting them does not make it so. The reality is that places and stories actually do have a power that inspire local people to incorporate sympathetically historic landscapes amid new development and evolving uses. This is where the public sense of Meaning comes from. Can history be romanticized by public historians who use the stories of history in their interpretation to build support for preservation or accuracy? Of course, but that does not make it so. Bad history, sentimental history, can be written even when the author has no interest in preservation a landscape. And economic development pressures are just as able to destroy neglected landscapes as use them adaptively, so it is a curious aberration to fire on the people who believe that historic interpretation can preserve places, considering the alternative.In fact, public historians or park rangers interpreting industrial landscapes could never get away with claiming that everybody had the best time working 16 hour days in the mills and factories of the first industrial revolution in the US. The local memories are too strong to let them. Would Ms. Stanton believe today's descendants of the mill workers -- or the visiting public for that matter -- are unaware of the term, "wage slave?" PLUS the story has more texture and feeling when the harder truths are told. In my experience the historians who instinctively are hostile to "heritage" including notably Edward T. Linenthal whose praise for this book appears on the jacket and whose disastrous or at least inept "Enola Gay" advice at the Smithsonian is well known, are not the historians who have actively worked with communities to preserve historic places. And by context it is interesting to consider that US historians for generations promoted or at least put up with a rosy picture of the 'happily enslaved' of the REAL slaves and there was no effort underway to preserve the cultural landscapes of the 'workers' either, quite unlike the preservation of workers houses and workers mills you see in today's industrial landscape preservation movement. Historians could do that all by themselves, without needing the 'motivation' Ms. Stanton sees of trying to preserve historic structures and enable the people of neglected landscapes to find jobs. Just because these public historians need to reach out to an audience does not mean it cheapens their historical ethics. ALL historians reach out to some audience or another, even if only to each other. Yes, some succumb. But it is not because they try to preserve places by using historic interpretation to tell stories of history to inspire appreciation of a sense of Place. Linenthal and Stanton could get out of their echo chamber of theory and into the world of communicating to real people in the real world. My only knowledge of Linenthal having done this was in Oklahoma City where they decided not to tell the story of the bomber or his motivation at that national "historic" site. Hmmm. I hope I am missing something here from these critics of 'heritage.'And when you consider that, in a later report written for another Massachusetts industrial landscape just to the West of Lowell, Ms Stanton almost wholly reverses her position that is the centre piece of this Lowell book, and NOW maintains that in fact the handling of these subtle and nuanced issues of public interpretation vs commercialized promotion is very well done, with none of her previous speculative fears of gauzy stories of happy workers just to make a buck, one wonders if it is not time to put some heft into her light-weight theory in this book. In fact it looks like Ms. Stanton has already grown well past the theories of this Lowell book.

I'd like to second all the positive and well-deserved praise for Stanton's The Lowell Experiment. In clear and thoughtful prose, Stanton's study does indeed "tackle the blindspots" in public history. Willing to move outside her own comfort zone, Stanton places her anthropological lens on the public historians themselves. Among other projects, she examines the complex relationship that public historians at Lowell have with their newly found comfort zone in the New Economy, and theorizes how that relationship colors how they are ultimately able to interpret history in their "post-industrial" city (particularly with regards to interpretive offerings that critically link Past to Present).This is a significant contribution to scholars/practitioners of Public History, but The Lowell Experiment should have an even wider readership. I would urge those in American Studies and Labor Studies to read this very important study and to consider teaching it in their graduate seminars. I used The Lowell Experiment in my graduate seminar, "Performing History" (in a History Department). Prior to reading Stanton's monograph, students read Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture, as well as Handler and Gable's The New History in an Old Museum - two texts that The Lowell Experiment self-consciously invokes. "Dynamic" is how I would describe the discussion on the day we addressed Stanton's text. Students were impressed and inspired by her scholarship, and provoked by her ideas (even while at the end of the day many felt a bit defeated about the possibilities for a truly radical public history--but this, of course, is not Stanton's burden to bear).

Stanton's book richly deserved the National Council of Public History's annual book prize, because, leveling a anthropologist's gaze at the public history profession, she exposes one of its most serious blind spots -- the question of why and how history could matter in today's public world. Stanton's exceedingly provocative study looks at the way the habits and ambitions of public historians combine to create distance between what we know about the past and the questions that knowledge could prompt us to ask about today and tomorrow. As one of the landmarks of 20th century public history, Lowell is a great laboratory for Stanton's ideas, and she renders it with memorable texture and detail. An excellent book for graduate courses and for the bookshelves of anyone interested in why historic sites languish while public appetite for history grows.