Performing the Postindustrial : The Limits of Radical History in Lowell, Massachusetts

Stanton, Cathy

Article that critically examines the relationship between the historical content of the Lowell National Historic Park (NHP) - built in the 1970s within the former mill architecture of Lowell, Massachusetts - and the ways and contexts in which this content is performed. Remarks on the conceptual birth of the Lowell NHP within the twentieth-century growth of "public history" as a discipline and an industry in the United States; the park's theoretical orientations. How the park's means of describing the textile industry and its workers in Lowell has the effect of relegating industrial life to the past and, as the author argues, "reinforc[ing], on a fundamental level, the continuing creation of Lowell as a postindustrial place" (94). How the growth of the park relates to a theory of the gentrification of the city of Lowell.

2007 spring

en

Journal Article

20th century - 21st century; Lowell, Massachusetts

98

Radical History Review

1534-1453