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E-book
Author Stanton, Cathy, author.

Title The Lowell experiment : public history in a postindustrial city / Cathy Stanton
Published Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2006]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xvi, 299 pages) : illustrations, map
Series Book collections on Project MUSE
Contents The map in the museum -- History, performance, ethnography -- Three tours of Lowell -- Public history in Lowell
Summary 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.-- Provided by Publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-294) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 07, 2023)
Subject Urban renewal -- Massachusetts -- Lowell
Urban anthropology -- Massachusetts -- Lowell
Deindustrialization -- Massachusetts -- Lowell -- History
HISTORY -- United States -- State & Local -- New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)
Deindustrialization
Urban anthropology
Urban renewal
Stadtentwicklung
SUBJECT Lowell National Historical Park (Lowell, Mass.) http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85078660
Lowell (Mass.) -- History
Subject Massachusetts -- Lowell
Massachusetts -- Lowell -- Lowell National Historical Park
Lowell, Mass.
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2006003180
ISBN 9781613761656
1613761651
9781613762325
1613762321