Landmarks of American History and Culture: Workshops for School Teachers
Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution
June 22-27, July 13-July 18, and July 27-Aug. 1, 2008
Dear Colleague,
The Tsongas Industrial History Center invites you to join us at Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell, Massachusetts, for a week-long summer Landmarks Workshop, Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This six-day (Sunday night through Friday) teacher workshop will use the rich resources of Lowell National Historical Park, Old Sturbridge Village, and Concord, MA, museums and historic sites to offer residential learning experiences during the following weeks: June 22–27, July 13–July 18, and July 27–August 1, 2008. Each participant will receive a stipend of $500 to cover housing, some meals, books, and other expenses. Some additional funds are available on a case-by-case basis for travel. Travel funds and stipend balances will be allocated after the Workshop is over.
Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution Website
The Inventing America Workshop website, www.uml.edu/tsongas/NEH, provides useful information about the Workshop and will soon include a full syllabus with all reading assignments and details about workshop sessions.
Theme
In 1978, Congress created Lowell National Historical Park, recognizing “that certain sites and structures in Lowell, Massachusetts, historically and culturally the most significant planned industrial city in the United States, symbolize in physical form the Industrial Revolution.” No city offers as dramatic a view of the American Industrial Revolution as Lowell. Founded by Boston merchants in the 1820s, Lowell quickly emerged as the foremost industrial city in the United States. These early industrial capitalists, aided by skilled mechanics, borrowed from and improved upon British engineering and manufacturing technology, first on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, and later on a far larger scale in Lowell, where they created a massive water-powered textile center on the Merrimack River. They sought to create a factory village that would compete successfully with English manufactures, but co-exist comfortably with the values of a traditional agricultural society. What these founders established, and the massive social, technological, and economic changes resulting from their enterprise, will be the subject of our Landmarks of American History workshop.
Lowell National Historical Park and the City of Lowell are extraordinarily rich “classrooms,” and the Inventing America workshop sessions make full use of them. Lowell’s “Mile of Mills” was once powered by canals that the Park now maintains and that we will explore on interpreted boat tours through the canals and out to the Merrimack River. At the Boott Cotton Mills, we can observe (and hear the roar of) ninety operating power looms weaving cotton cloth, and use new exhibits and audio-visual materials to learn about topics ranging from farm labor, to the inventions and workers of Lowell’s heyday, to modern international textile production. In the nearby Boott boardinghouse, we will learn from unique exhibits that bring to life the living conditions of Lowell’s “mill girls” and the stories of later Lowell immigrants. Connecting these and other Lowell historical and cultural sites is a trolley system using restored turn-of-the-century trolleys that contribute to the historical ambience that pervades Lowell today.
Content, Scope, and Approach
The Inventing America Workshop combines scholarly presentations with on-site investigations of the canals, mills, worker housing, and exhibits of Lowell National Historical Park and of other sites in Lowell's historic district. Sessions draw on scholarly monographs (discussed below), primary sources, and works of literature and historical fiction. We intersperse lecture-discussions, hands-on activities, and field investigations. In addition to Lowell’s landmark resources, we take full advantage of Old Sturbridge Village exhibits and scholars to explore pre-industrial rural life and draw on the expertise of scholars and presenters at Walden Pond and the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, to explore how prominent authors addressed the question of industrialization’s effect on American life, values, and the environment.
Hands-on activities throughout the week help participants deepen understanding by engaging in simulations where they weave cloth, build water-powered mill systems, and work on an assembly line. After cooking a meal over fireplaces at Old Sturbridge Village and sharing a boardinghouse dinner at the Boott Cotton Mills, we will reflect on differences and similarities between farm and factory life. Teachers of history, language arts, science, and math will find Lowell a most engaging classroom.
Assigned readings include one core text, Inventing America: A History of the United States, Vol. 1 (1st or 2nd edition), that all participants are to purchase. The Center will provide all other books and resources, scholarly readings, farm and factory primary sources, excerpts from works by such authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, and a wide variety of lesson plans teachers can adapt to their classrooms.
Participants are to read, prior to the Workshop, one of the following works of historical fiction for youth: Katherine Paterson's Lyddie (New York: Puffin Books, 1991); OR Avi's Beyond the Western Sea, Book Two: Lord Kirkle's Money (New York: Orchard Books, 1996); OR Barry Denenberg's So Far From Home –The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl (from the Dear America series, New York: Scholastic, 1997). Participants may either purchase the historical fiction title of their choice or borrow copies from a library.
Three generations of scholars have recognized the importance of Lowell to American history, encompassing such areas of study as technology and business, women’s history, labor history, urban studies, and American studies. The finest of these works place Lowell in larger regional or national contexts.
In the 1920s Caroline F. Ware, in a path-breaking study of New England’s textile industry, examined not only the men who founded Lowell’s cotton textile corporations, but also the women who worked in the mills. Her book remains a classic among scholars of labor and business history. Influenced by her work, Thomas Dublin produced the Bancroft prize-winning Women at Work, edited volumes of factory letters for his work Farm to Factory, and authored Lowell: The Story of an Industrial City, the visitor handbook of Lowell National Historical Park.
An important complement to Dublin’s work is Thomas Bender’s Toward an Urban Vision, one of the finest urban histories produced to date. Bender explores the changing social fabric and economic forces in Lowell as it grew, within the span of twenty-five years, from a factory village to a teeming urban center.
The scholarship on the city’s industrial interests, engineering, and technology is equally extensive. One such study, George S. Gibbs’ monograph of the Saco-Lowell Company, highlighted the important role Lowell played in the nation’s early machine-making industry. Robert Dalzell’s Enterprising Elite sheds significant light on the kinship networks of the founding “Boston Associates,” their business practices, and the social and political influences this class exerted over nineteenth-century New England. Merritt Roe Smith devotes an entire chapter to the Spindle City in Inventing America (used as required reading in the Workshop), a recent American history textbook for college and advanced placement high school students. Inventing America is a synthetic narrative that explores the nation’s history through the lens of technology, invention, innovation, and social change.
Core Faculty and Specialist Lecturers
The scholars and presenters include former Lowell National Historical Park Historian Gray Fitzsimons, whose ten years of in-depth study make him one of the foremost scholars of Lowell history. History faculty include Associate Professor Dr. Chad Montrie of UMass Lowell, whose specialty is US environmental, labor, and social history; Dr. Merritt Roe Smith, Historian of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-author of the acclaimed US History text Inventing America; Dr. Patrick Malone, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and American Civilization, and preeminent authority on Lowell’s canal system; and UMass Lowell faculty members Dr. Robert Forrant, Labor Historian and Professor of Regional, Economic, and Social Development, whose recent studies of current labor issues are regularly quoted in the press; Dr. Melissa Pennell, Professor of English and American Studies, who has shared her research interest in American literature between 1820 and 1860 through participation in many teacher workshops; Dr. Bridget Marshall, Assistant Professor of English, whose presentations on teaching with primary sources, historical fiction, and education websites are always well-received by teachers.
To start the week’s activities, Roe Smith will engage teachers in primary source research about the transformation of such New England industries as shoes, machine tools, guns, and furniture in a newly developing market and cash economy. Later in the day, Pat Malone presents a slide overview and leads a teacher favorite: a trolley-and-boat tour of Lowell’s canals and Merrimack River. We finish with a look at the Park’s Suffolk Mill turbines, flywheel, and belt-and-pulley system of powering looms. On Tuesday, at Old Sturbridge Village, Historian Jack Larkin illuminates the transition from an agrarian-based economy to a market-based economy. Teachers will discover how farming towns and traditional apprenticeships were affected by the growing market and by industrialization through primary sources, media, and various teaching strategies. Back in Lowell, on Wednesday we will examine with Gray Fitzsimons the volatility of textile manufacturing before the Civil War, discussing the consequences of competition and market fluctuations on prices, wages, working conditions, and consequent worker protests. Gray will also co-lead (with teacher Dave McKean) our immigration study tour on Friday, the last day of the workshop. Also on Wednesday, Bob Forrant builds on participants’ experience in the Tsongas Center’s assembly line simulation by looking at labor’s responses to the new industrial order: from early “turnouts” to the formation of labor associations to a series of petitions for a ten-hour workday. Bridget Marshall follows with a primary-source-based look at working conditions in Lowell’s mills at this time. On Thursday, Melissa Pennell and Chad Montrie will lay the intellectual groundwork for our explorations at two Concord sites in talks on Industrialization, Individualism, and Nature. Two sessions during the week will feature master teachers Joyce Hankey and Barb Fauvel of the Lowell Public Schools, who will lead discussions about meaningful lesson planning and classroom applications of information gathered through field visits, scholarly presentations, readings, and hands-on activities.
Eligibility and Selection Criteria
Full-time and part-time classroom teachers in public, private, parochial, and charter schools, as well as home-schooling parents, are eligible to participate. Other K-12 school personnel, including administrators, substitute teachers, classroom paraprofessionals, and librarians, are also eligible to participate, subject to available space.
Teachers at schools in the United States or its territorial possessions or Americans teaching in foreign schools where at least 50 percent of the students are American nationals are eligible for this program. Applicants must be United States citizens, residents of U.S. jurisdictions, or foreign nationals who have been residing in the United States or its territories for at least the three years immediately preceding the application deadline. Foreign nationals teaching abroad are not eligible to apply. Individuals may not apply to participate in a Workshop given by the same director on the same topic in which they have previously participated; in other words, they should not apply to attend the same Workshop twice. Individuals may not apply to study with a director of a Landmarks project who is a family member. Preference will be given to those who are new to the program.
Applicants must complete the NEH application cover sheet and provide all of the information requested below to be considered eligible. An individual may apply to and participate in no more than two Landmarks projects in one summer.
Preference will be given to those applicants whose participation in the Workshop is likely not only to enhance their classroom teaching but also to be incorporated into the school’s curriculum.
The Week’s Activities in Brief (list of related readings to be posted on website at www.uml.edu/tsongas/NEH)
SUNDAY Evening: Welcome to Lowell!
“Mary Paul Comes to Lowell”—Welcome reception and dinner, hands-on weaving and band-box unpacking in the Boott Cotton Mills Museum
MONDAY: American Industrialization: Lowell, Massachusetts, in International Context
Dr. Merritt Roe Smith: The Rise of American System of Manufacturing; Dr. Patrick Malone: Harnessing the Merrimack River: Lowell’s Dams, Canals, Powerhouses, and Machinery
Boat tour of Lowell’s canal system with Dr. Malone
Hands-on Power to Production workshop and tour of Suffolk Mill waterpower exhibits
Classroom applications: Teaching with David Macaulay’s video Mill Times and with the economics game “Millopoly"
Tour and role-play in restored boardinghouse; “mill girl” boardinghouse dinner at Boott Mill
TUESDAY: Comparing Farm and Factory Life, and Cash and Market Economies
Field Study at Old Sturbridge Village, including Fireplace Cooking (by participants) and dinner
WEDNESDAY: Market Volatility, Competition, and Worker Responses to the New Industrial Order
Gray Fitzsimons: Managing Markets, Managing Workers: The Volatility of Textile Manufacturing
Hands-On Simulation (Workers on the Line assembly line activity); tour of Boott Cotton Mills Weave Room
Dr. Robert Forrant: Labor Responses to the New Industrial Order
Dr. Bridget Marshall: Teaching with Primary Sources (introduction followed by focused choices)
Dinner-Theater: “Three Mill Girls”: Marcia Estabrook, performer
THURSDAY: Industrialization and Nature: A Comparison of Lowell and Concord
Drs. Melissa Pennell and Chad Montrie, UMass Lowell: Continuity and Change: Industrialization, Individualism, and Nature
“Meet the Author” Picnic at Walden Pond: Richard Smith as Henry David Thoreau at the site of Thoreau’s Cabin
Study tours at Concord’s Old Manse, home of the Emersons and Hawthornes: house tour, Concord River boat tour, and landscape tour.
FRIDAY: Immigration and Industrialization: Poverty or Upward Mobility?
Gray Fitzsimons: “Immigration, Class, and Industrialization: Lowell’s Irish and French Canadians as Case Studies”
Tour of St. Patrick’s Church and “the Acre,” Lowell’s immigrant neighborhood, with Gray Fitzsimons and local historian and teacher Dave McKean
Academic Resources
Participants have easy access to the many resources available in the Tsongas Center Teacher Resource Room and Lowell National Historical Park’s library, as well as at the city library and UMass Lowell’s Center for Lowell History (a short walk across Boardinghouse Park near the Boott Mills). The Center for Lowell History has a significant collection of industrial and Lowell history primary sources, many of which are available online (http://library.uml.edu/clh). Computer facilities with Internet/e-mail access are available at the Tsongas Center, city library, and Doubletree Hotel.
Workshop Products
The Tsongas Center will make available many lesson plans (both published and unpublished) and sources from which teachers can choose in preparing their Workshop product, a “portfolio” of activities and/or lesson plans using workshop content (though not necessarily focused on Lowell) for five classroom periods of instruction. Teachers will (1) develop or adapt these sources and lesson plans and submit them to the Tsongas Center by September 1, 2008, (2) choose from this portfolio one activity or lesson they developed or adapted and nominate it for posting on the Tsongas Industrial History Center’s website, (3) implement lessons with students, and (4) respond to an April 2009 survey about the impact of the Workshop on their teaching and student learning.
Housing and Meals
Lodging will be provided at the Doubletree Hotel, within walking distance (three blocks), for $88 x 5 days = $440 (or $220 if two share a room; the Tsongas Center will arrange sharing for those interested), including air conditioning and all usual services, including Internet access. Should participants wish to come earlier than Sunday or stay beyond Friday, they may need to pay a higher room rate for the extra days. The Workshop budget covers three dinners and one lunch (Sunday night buffet, “mill girl” boardinghouse dinner, 1830 fireplace dinner, and a “Meet the Author” box lunch at Walden Pond). The remainder of the meal plan is provided by Aramark, UMass Lowell’s caterer, at an estimated cost of $130 for the week (five breakfasts, morning and afternoon coffee breaks, four lunches, and one dinner at the Tsongas Center). Participants will be on their own for dinner Thursday night.
Credit
The Tsongas Industrial History Center will provide teacher-participants a certificate stating the teacher has earned up to forty professional development credits (CEUs/PDPs) for the face-to-face portion of the Workshop and up to forty additional CEUs/PDPs if pre/post Workshop assignments are completed, including the submission of a copy of a curriculum portfolio of at least five class periods of instruction. At additional cost, teachers wishing graduate credit may earn up to three graduate credits for the Workshop through the UMass Lowell Graduate School of Education.
Cultural and Recreational Resources
Lowell offers a rich array of cultural and recreational offerings. Not far from the Boott Cotton Mills Museum are the American Textile History Museum, New England Quilt Museum, Revolving Museum and National Streetcar Museum of Lowell. Lowell’s arts scene continues to grow and thrive, with such institutions as the Whistler House Museum of Art, Brush Art Gallery and Studios, and Merrimack Repertory Theater drawing visitors from throughout the region. Lowell’s downtown historic district is lined with shops, antique stores, and a variety of ethnic restaurants, often housed in beautifully restored buildings. Lowell is also home to a minor-league ballpark and sports arena. Other downtown-area attractions include Kerouac Park and the nearby Riverwalk along the Merrimack.
Application Procedure and Deadline
Application information is included with this letter. You will need to complete the application, following the instructions outlined in the NEH instruction sheets. A completed application consists of three copies of the following collated items:
- the completed application cover sheet (filled out online, then printed)
http://www.neh.gov/online/education/participants
(Be sure to choose Landmarks of American History Workshop on this page.)
- a résumé
- an application essay (no longer than one double-spaced page) as outlined below
- one letter of recommendation as described below.
(Please see next page.)
Application Essay
Perhaps the most important part of the completed application is an essay of up to one double-spaced page. This essay should include information about the following: 1) your professional background and interest in the subject of the Workshop; 2) special perspectives, skills, or experiences of yours that would contribute to the Workshop; and 3) how the experience would enhance your own--and possibly others’--teaching or school service (three hard copies submitted by mail to the Tsongas Industrial History Center).
Letter of Recommendation
The letter of recommendation from the principal or department head of your teaching institution or the head of a home schooling association should describe the positive impact of your participation in this NEH Workshop on the school.
Please ask your referee to sign his/her name across the seal on the back of the envelope containing the letter, and enclose the letter with your application.
Please collate your application in the following order: 1) cover sheet, 2) résumé, and 3) essay (three copies of each), and 4) letter of recommendation (sealed as described above). Your completed application must be postmarked no later than March 17, 2008 and addressed as follows:
Ellen Anstey, Administrative Assistant
Tsongas Industrial History Center
Boott Cotton Mills
115 John St.
Lowell, MA 01852
978-970-5080
Questions and comments should be directed to Ellen Anstey at Ellen_Anstey@uml.edu or 978-970-5080.
Successful candidates will be notified by April 16, 2008, and will have until April 23, 2008 to accept or decline the offer. Once you confirm your participation, you will receive a packet of information that includes a detailed agenda, Workshop readings, and travel and housing information.
We look forward to welcoming you to historic Lowell!
Sincerely,
Sheila Kirschbaum
Co-Director: Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution
Tsongas Industrial History Center
Beryl Rosenthal
Co-Director: Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution
Tsongas Industrial History Center
This project is funded as part of the We the People initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Sharing the lessons of history with all Americans.
