The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City – STANTON (PHR)

STANTON, Cathy. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. 304p. Resenha de: ASHTON, Paul. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.

Lowell National Historical Park was established in Massachusetts in the United States in 1979. It was part of an experiment which drew on a new economic industry – cultural tourism – to rehabilitate a former textile city, once held up as an exemplar of capitalist industrialisation, that had been devastated by late twentieth-century deindustrialisation.

In her highly readable and original book, The Lowell Experiment, Cathy Stanton explores the politics of public history on a number of levels using this National Historical Park (NHP) as a rich case study. Public history’s role in facilitating change, rather than simply recording or reflecting it (pxiii), is treated as are divisions within the public history movement in the USA and the contested nature of the term ‘public history’. Leia Mais