Culture-Led Redevelopment and the Role of Public History

Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006)

Diane Lea, "America's Preservation Ethos: A Tribute to Enduring Ideals" in Robert Stipe, ed., A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)


We've read some works this semester that served as a kind of call to arms. Last week's reading encouraged an earnest engagement with the "tough stuff of history," namely slavery. Steven Weil's collection of essays promoted the benefits of consumer-based museums and suggested the dwindling relevance of masterful collections. This week, Cathy Stanton has raised the stakes. For Stanton, public historians are essentially political actors, and nothing short of direct, often confrontational engagement with both past and present will get the job done.

Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell, MA



Stanton's book is an intelligent and controversial piece of work, one that invites a lot of soul searching - particularly for aspiring historians with a decidedly leftist bent (like myself). I can relate directly with the personal narratives Stanton provides here of solidly middle-class white professionals who have essentially stripped away their ethnic and working class heritage. Or whom clumsily rationalize their professional advancement and material comforts despite a deep skepticism and distaste for unregulated capitalism. Many of the participants interviewed here were in fact the first generation to transcend their childhood socioeconomic status, whereas I'm two and in some cases three generations removed from that world. I don't feel that my Irish, Italian, or Catholic heritage has in any tangible way defined who I am and I have largely stripped away those identity markers (sorry Pop-Pop). If anything I'm more willing to embrace a broad identification as twentieth century American secular humanist, or even Northeast middle class suburbanite. Stanton is a bit shortsighted here though. She falls into the same trap of denying ethnicity simply because it's WASP-ish. "American" can connote an ethnicity, albeit a complex one. Likewise, to suggest that someone somehow embodies an Irish heritage because their grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the late nineteenth century is overstating the case, to say nothing of the fact that it implies a unified, essential Irish heritage. But we're getting off track here.

Central to Stanton's work isn't necessarily the denial of ethnicity by museum professionals, but rather the unwieldy marriage of historic preservation and economic revitalization. How can public historians in Lowell, MA both be true to the historical record while not interrupting the profit-driven motives of shared institutional spaces? How can an institution lament the sins of capitalism in one era (mill work in the mid-nineteenth century) and yet deny the clear linkages with labor and immigration patterns in their own time? In their efforts to champion Lowell as an urban renewal project, urban planners and historians both neglected the hard realities of postindustrial life in twenty-first century New England. My question, as I read through this book... What the hell were they supposed to do? The opportunities for presentist interpretation in Lowell, MA are undeniable. But how, as museum planners, do you visualize and communicate that pattern? What does an exhibit about de-industrialization look like? Arguably, the Acre tour is just such an attempt, but is it not irresponsible, and frankly disrespectful, to present a living community as a visual representation of urban blight? The Acre tour needs to better incorporate the members of that community if it expects to have any success as a valuable and ethical museum-going experience. As I try to imagine the work involved in such a project, I wonder if I'm truly up for the task.