Printer FriendlyThe 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 (such as "mill girl" letters), and works of literature and historical fiction. We intersperse hands-on activities with lecture-discussions 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 Minute Man National Historical Park 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 deepen NEH Summer Scholars' understanding by engaging them in simulations where they weave cloth, build water-powered mill systems, and work on assembly lines. NEH Summer Scholars even cook a meal over fireplaces at Old Sturbridge Village and discuss farm vs. factory life after a boardinghouse dinner at the Boott Cotton Mills.
The Inventing America Workshop draws from the work of three generations of scholars who have recognized the importance of Lowell to American history. The studies encompass such areas 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 study of the New England 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 the outstanding Lowell: The Story of an Industrial City, the visitor handbook of Lowell National Historical Park (provided to all NEH Summer Scholars).
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 from a factory village to a teeming urban center. The scholarship on the city's industrial interests, engineering, and technology is equally extensive. Robert Dalzell's Enterprising Elite examines 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 (one of our scholar-presenters) devotes an entire chapter to the Spindle City in Inventing America: A History of the United States, Vol. 1, an American history textbook (AP and college) that explores the nation's history through the lens of technology, invention, innovation, and social change.
The Workshop's assigned readings include Inventing America as the one core text that all NEH Summer Scholars should purchase (either the 1st or 2nd edition). By mail and through the Workshop website, the Tsongas Industrial History Center provides all other books, scholarly readings, farm and factory primary sources, excerpts from literary works by such authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and a wide variety of lesson plans.
NEH Summer Scholars should 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 a copy from a library. Copies of all three works will be available during the Workshop.
