the lowell experiment summary

Cathy Stanton

Writer, ethnographer, public humanist, the lowell experiment.

I chose Lowell as my dissertation fieldwork site for a couple of reasons. First, it went down the culture-led path earlier than most other places and hence has served as a model for this kind of place-making and knowledge-production, as well as a testing-ground for what was then the emerging field of professional public history.

And second, the industrial history on display in Lowell raises unusually critical questions about the development and consequences of industrial capitalism. That made Lowell NHP a highly interesting site at which to investigate the effects of public historical scholarship within the next wave of capitalist development, which is based more on the production of ideas and services rather than more tangible goods.

The core question in the book was, “What effect have these critical interpretations had on the shaping of postindustrial Lowell, and what can that tell us about the potential for public scholarship in these kinds of projects and settings?”

In a nutshell, my answer is that critical questioning in Lowell’s public history and heritage realm has been largely sequestered or enclaved so that its insights are not permitted to unsettle the positive image of the city’s overall redevelopment project. I trace how this is affected by public historians’ own socioeconomic positioning within the postindustrial “new economy.”

I also look at how the specific cultural politics of the city have created a division of cultural labor that reinforces the distance between the most critical of public historical observers and the areas where their insights might touch most closely on vexed contemporary questions in the city (for example, issues arising from persistent poverty levels, recent immigration, gentrification, and Lowell’s ongoing vulnerability to economic fluctuations). The moments of provocative questioning at the national park and its allied productions remain essentially isolated from present-day discourse in Lowell in a way that is systemic and, on some level, purposeful.

The Lowell Experiment was the winner of the 2007 National Council on Public History Book Award.

“[One] of the best case studies in the world of public history I have yet read, and a very important story to tell.” ~ Edward T. Linenthal, author of Preserving Memory and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory

“[A] landmark achievement in the application of interdisciplinary scholarship to fundamental questions of history in the civic realm… Stanton has produced a study of the highest quality, one that should be read by both aspiring and practicing public historians.” ~ Journal of American History

“[T]hought-provoking. [Stanton] raises significant questions about how decisions are made to develop a historic site and how to interpret it, and she offers valuable insights.” ~ Northeast Anthropology

“[C]lear, compelling prose… Those with interests in ethnography, heritage and history, the importance of people over forces (or as a force), labor and capital, community design, as well as the work of public historians, will enjoy reading Stanton’s thoughtful analysis of Lowell’s ongoing experiment.” ~ H-Urban

“[C]arefully researched, provocative…” ~ The Public Historian

“Stanton’s stimulating and reflective work is a timely and welcome contribution to a small but growing body of work that critically examines public history.” ~ Public History Review

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The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City . By Cathy Stanton. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. xvi, 299 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 1-55849-546-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-55849-547-9.)

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Joseph Heathcott, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City . By Cathy Stanton. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. xvi, 299 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 1-55849-546-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-55849-547-9.), Journal of American History , Volume 94, Issue 3, December 2007, Pages 1015–1016, https://doi.org/10.2307/25095284

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This study of the transformation of the Lowell mills from derelict factories to revenue-generating heritage site offers a thorough account of one of the most influential public history projects ever undertaken in the context of the postindustrial urban landscape.

Superbly narrated by Cathy Stanton, an adjunct faculty member at Tufts University and the Union Institute, The Lowell Experiment examines in admirable detail a preservation and interpretation project that spans four decades, involving hundreds of actors and the expenditure of millions of dollars of public and private money. The challenge for Stanton is formidable. She must balance the history of Lowell, Massachusetts, with the history of efforts to save it, while accounting for the contrapuntal effects of capital flight, population drain, and the manifold actions of small government agencies, grassroots organizations, and committed individuals.

The Lowell Experiment makes three principal contributions to the emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that critically examines the intersection of heritage tourism, cultural resource management, and preservation in twentieth-century America. First, Stanton has produced the definitive work on the preservation of Lowell. It is thorough, superbly researched, and engagingly written. She offers a striking range of voices, from academic and public historians to former mill workers, labor leaders, preservationists, planners, city council members, state agency staff, and real estate developers.

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• Technology and Culture

The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (review)

• Laurence F. Gross
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 50, Number 1, January 2009
• pp. 226-228
• 10.1353/tech.0.0196
• View Citation

Additional Information

• The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City
• Laurence F. Gross (bio)

Cathy Stanton’s book offers historians a novel approach to the practice of their craft. In looking at the exhibits and programs of the Lowell National Historical Park, she studies the actors along with their message. As someone involved with these activities for some thirty years, often as a direct participant, I found her account intriguing. Stanton writes as a leftist ethnographer interacting with people at all levels of the Park Service in Lowell, as well as with representatives of the community’s effort to promote itself through its history in what she calls its postindustrial phase. She chronicles the use of its novel (but also typical) industrial history, cooperation among ethnic groups, and coordinated support by and for the local business elite.

Stanton’s interpretation relies heavily on two types of tours, “The Run [End Page 226] of the Mill” boat and walking tour, and “A Walking Tour of the Acre,” traditionally one of Lowell’s poorest neighborhoods. She also considers a special tour by Peter Aucella, former head of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission and later assistant superintendent for the park. In both positions, as well as when an aide to the late Senator Paul Tsongas, Aucella marshaled federal dollars to support redevelopment efforts. And thus arise the primary sources of tension in Stanton’s account: Can the heritage industry serve two bosses, public history and economic development? She also points to further sources of difficulty: the backgrounds of the principal actors, left-leaning historians hobbled by their own status as success-seeking members of the postindustrial economy, and their conflict with locals claiming authority through residence.

Stanton’s primary finding is that—because of their unwillingness to question their own place in the new economy, because of the locals’ desire for a positive image of their predecessors, and because of the developers’ goals of economic resurgence—Lowell’s historians give only its pre–Civil War history a radical interpretation. They are unable to bring the same critical voice to the more recent past, let alone current events. Stanton marshals substantial evidence for her assertions: Tours leave visitors with the impression that Lowell symbolizes an American success story of progress, better working conditions, diminished strife, and higher standards of living.

She identifies this view both with Lowell’s public historians and with the locals whose families have made a progression as Euro-American immigrants who in comparatively recent times left blue-collar jobs for professional careers. Their success leads them to gloss over or ignore a countervailing story that would portray recent and current conditions as a new cycle in an old story which has seen little if any linear progression. Recent immigrants in Lowell, primarily Cambodians, work in low-paying, boring jobs, and witness growing separation between classes. Facing economic segregation and political exclusion, they lack the unified voice of “progress” adopted by the Euro-Americans now dominant in both groups of Lowell’s interpreters.

Stanton pays little attention to the permanent exhibit in the Boott Cotton Mill. She does note, however, that its original concluding interpretive space celebrated eight then-current businesses in the city. From the start a jarring presence, given the rest of the exhibit’s critical approach to U.S. industrial development, this space took on new meaning as one after another of the enterprises it celebrated failed, most notably Wang Computers, the savior of the city in the 1980s, and the Prince Spaghetti Factory, a major employer that was purchased and closed by a rival.

And here we come to some issues with this otherwise intriguing tale. How did such a celebration gain a place in this critique of industrial capitalism? Presumably via the influence of the locals and developers working to devise and market a “progressive” image to attract further development. [End Page 227] The means are not clarified here, however. I should also note that in my years of experience in sending working-class college students to, and talking with teachers about...

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How did the Lowell system contribute to the industrialization of the united states?

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Lowell built on the advances made in the British textile industry, such as the use of the power loom, to industrialize American textile production. He was the first factory owner in the United States to create a textile mill that was vertically integrated.

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The lowell experiment.

Public History in a Postindustrial City

by Cathy Stanton

Published by: University of Massachusetts Press

320 Pages , 6.12 x 9.25 x 0.90 in , 15

• 9781558495470
• Published: August 2006

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Cathy Stanton is an adjunct faculty member at Tufts University and Vermont College of Union Institute & University.

"I am very, very impressed with this book. . . . The writing is graceful, precise, revealing a host of complex issues rather than covering them up with verbiage. . . . It is one of the best case studies in the world of public history I have yet read, and a very important story to tell. . . . I think this book will be very well received and widely reviewed."—Edward T. Linenthal, author of Preserving Memory and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory "This is the best thing I have read on the politics of public history in a long time. . . . Stanton has very fresh insights on the relationship between urban real estate developers and progressive public historians, and on what she calls 'rituals of reconnection' through which middle-class industrial historians and their middle-class visitors use places such as Lowell to connect with their grandparents' working-class backgrounds."—David Glassberg, author of Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life "[ The Lowell Experiment ] is thorough, superbly researched, and engagingly written. "¦ Stanton has produced a study of the highest quality, one that should be read by both aspiring and practicing public historians. It should be a required text in introductory courses for public history and historic preservation graduate programs, as it will prepare students for the intense, contentious, multivocal, and politically charged world of history in the public realm."— The Journal of American History "This ethnographic study of Lowell's public history demonstrates care for a community in flux as well as respect for (and critique of) local knowledge and public memory. Stanton's scholarship is informed by participation in public history and, in turn, her analysis and reflection can help inform that very public history. . . . Stanton's clear, compelling prose provides a model for anthropological study of one's socioeconomic equals. . . . There is much to recommend in this book."— H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences "Cathy Stanton's book offers historians a novel approach to the practice of their craft. . . . Stanton sets forth insightful criticisms of the dangers inherent in the heritage gambit of history for developmental purposes."— Technology and Culture

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The Lowell experiment : public history in a postindustrial city

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Lowell, story of an industrial city: rebirth of lowell.

National Park Service

Twelve years ago Lowell decided that its identity was important. Important to its people and the Nation. There are hundreds of people who should be credited for discovering this America. Many workers…wanted the good and the bad of the past preserved, rather than flattened and denied.

Part of a series of articles titled Lowell, Story of an Industrial City .

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Last updated: June 15, 2018

Screen Rant

Alien: romulus' goo experiments & big chap connection explained.

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8 Reasons Alien: Romulus' Reviews Are So Positive

Ian holm's role in alien: romulus explained, alien: romulus review - horrifying sci-fi actioner has the best (& worst) of the alien franchise.

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Alien: Romulus!

• Alien: Romulus features the original Xenomorph and the return of the black goo storyline from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
• Weyland-Yutani aims to forcefully evolve humanity using the black goo, leading to dangerous experiments and unforeseen consequences.
• The black goo, now headed to Yvaga, may have disastrous effects on the planet, setting up potential for a sequel to Alien: Romulus.

Alien: Romulus features experiments on black goo as a major story beat, and here's what the goo means and how it connects to Big Chap from the original Alien . Big Chap is the common nickname for the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott's 1979 classic Alien , and while it has become one of the most iconic movie monsters of all time, every other Alien movie has focused on different types of Xenomorph. However, Alien: Romulus decides to bring back the franchise's original Xenomorph, with it playing a major role in the film's black goo storyline.

Alien: Romulus is finally here, and the film manages to do the impossible by linking Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant prequels with the original Alien series . In the Alien timeline, Alien: Romulus is set between Alien and Aliens , with the film taking place shortly after Big Chap terrorized the crew of the Nostromo . As it turns out, the fight against Ripley wasn't the last time that this Xenomorph would encounter humans, as the alien comes back in the newest sequel in a big way, connecting to the big twist at the end of Alien: Romulus .

Alien: Romulus’ reviews are in, with critics describing Álvarez’s film as the best Alien movie since James Cameron’s Aliens and a return to the form.

Alien's Big Chap Helped Weyland Discover The Prometheus Goo

The goo returns from prometheus & alien: covenant.

The Alien franchise's black goo plays a major role in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant , and it just unexpectedly came back in Alien: Romulus . In Prometheus , the black goo (known as chemical A0-3959X.91 - 15) was found by the prequel's main cast on the planet LV-223. Seemingly having been created by the Engineers, the black goo has the ability to create, take, and transform life, with David using it to wipe out an entire civilization of Engineers in Alien: Covenant while it is also used to create new lifeforms out of deceased and living individuals.

Although the black goo storyline was seemingly over after Alien: Covenant , it made a surprise return in Alien: Romulus . As Rook reveals to the cast of Alien: Romulus , the Weyland-Yutani Corporation was able to recover the Xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo , allowing it to analyze the terrifying creature. Upon studying the Xenomorph, they were able to extract the black goo from the creature , using it to synthesize more samples of it.

Sometimes referred to as " Prometheus Fire ," Weyland-Yutani decided to run experiments on the black goo in the hopes of using it to evolve human civilization. These experiments took place on the Romulus space station, but after a Xenomorph was unleashed, the station was abandoned. Thus, the black goo remained in the lab, with it set to suffer the fate of crashing into the planetary rings until the crew of the Corbelan arrived and discovered the samples .

Alien: Romulus includes a role for original Alien star Ian Holm, who played Ash in the 1979 film. Here's his character and connections explained.

Why Weyland Wants To Create A New Black Goo

Weyland-yutani wants to forcefully evolve humanity.

Despite the incredible danger of the pathogen, Weyland-Yutani wanted to harness the power of the black goo, meaning that the company needed to create more of it. As Rook and Andy explain in the film, humans are imperfect beings, meaning that they are not perfect for the company. However, Weyland-Yutani theorized that they could use the black goo to forcefully evolve the humans into perfect beings. This would make them better workers while also completing Peter Weyland's original vision of becoming a creator in his own right.

What Went Wrong With Weyland's Goo Experiments

Alien: romulus' rat experiment proves why the goo is dangerous.

Although Weyland-Yutani's use of the black goo didn't start out as well-intentioned, things went far worse than they could have predicted. Alien: Romulus features footage of a rat that was injected with the black goo after death . Although it initially manages to come back to life, the black goo eventually causes it to mutate into a horrifying monster, with it eventually being killed again. This is reinforced later in the film when Kay injects herself with the black goo only for her baby to be born as a giant, pale, deadly creature.

The bridge between Alien: Covenant and Alien: Romulus ' point in the timeline still has some holes, leading to some questions regarding the company's knowledge of the black goo. The crew of the Prometheus and Covenant had already discovered that the black goo turned people into monsters, with the synthetic David even using this to his advantage. It isn't clear how Weyland-Yutani discovered the black goo's properties without knowing its dangers, as they would presumably have learned about David's runaway Weyland-Yutani ship from the end of Alien: Covenant . However, it is possible that they learned about the goo on their own.

Is There Any Black Goo Left After Alien: Romulus?

It is headed to an entirely different planet.

Despite the Remus and Romulus space stations being destroyed, the black goo managed to make it out of the ship intact. This is because Rain and Kay take several samples of it back on board the Corbelan before escaping the space station. While Kay does use one sample on herself, Alien: Romulus shows that there were several samples with the two characters, meaning that most of these should still be on their ship.

However, the black goo isn't going back to a Weyland-Yutani planet anytime soon . Instead, it is headed to Yvaga along with the rest of the Corbelan , a planet on which Weyland-Yutani is banned. The company does know that the black goo is on their ship, as they talk to Rook before his death. However, it may be hard to get it back while the Corbelan is on its nine-year journey to Yvaga.

Somewhere between Alien & Aliens — fitting given its place in the timeline — Romulus serves up blockbuster-level action & visceral horror all in one.

What Alien: Romulus' Goo Reveals Means For The Franchise's Future

It could end up having a disastrous effect on yvaga.

The reveal of the black goo in Alien: Romulus is exciting, as it could mean a lot for the franchise's future. Despite the expectations of many fans, the return of the black goo means that the impact of the Prometheus sequels on the Alien franchise isn't gone , with the film carrying on the prequel series' biggest storyline. This could mean that tons of Prometheus storylines could come back into play, with there even being potential for Michael Fassbender's David villain from Alien: Covenant to return.

Alien: Covenant has shown that the black goo is able to quickly wipe out entire civilizations, and unfortunately for Yvaga, that may happen again. Since the black goo is being transported to Yvaga, the once beautiful planet may suffer the same fate as Planet 4 from Alien: Covenant . The black goo could decimate every lifeform on Yvaga, turning it into a terrifying hellscape of mutated creatures and Xenomorph. Weyland-Yutani will undoubtedly try to get their hands on the black goo before this happens, setting up an exciting sequel to Alien: Romulus .

Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus is the seventh film in the Alien franchise. The movie is directed by Fede Álvarez and will focus on a new young group of characters who come face to face with the terrifying Xenomorphs. Alien: Romulus is a stand-alone film and takes place in a time not yet explored in the Alien franchise.