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Lowell, Massachusetts was the first fully planned industrial city in the United States, and the Boott Mill, established in the 1820s along the Merrimack River, stood at the center of this bold experiment in industrial capitalism. For decades, the company-owned boardinghouses that housed the mills' workers were as much a part of the Lowell system as the looms themselves: a managed, closely supervised domestic world where the rhythms of mill life extended from the factory floor into every corner of daily existence.

Living on the Boott brings this vanished world back to life through rigorous historical archaeology. Drawing on excavations conducted at the Boott Mills boardinghouse complex, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry examine the material remains of the men and women who lived and worked in Lowell's textile industry from the early nineteenth century through its long decline. Through painstaking analysis of ceramics, faunal assemblages, tobacco-related artifacts, and other recovered objects, the authors reconstruct the daily lives, diets, domestic routines, and social relationships of successive generations of boardinghouse residents—from the young "mill girls" recruited from rural New England who made Lowell famous, to the Irish immigrant workers who increasingly replaced them as the century progressed.

The result is a richly documented social history written not from official records alone, but from the objects people actually used, discarded, and left behind. The book illuminates how class, gender, ethnicity, and labor intersected in the intimate spaces of the boardinghouse, and documents the profound changes in living conditions as the Lowell system evolved and the workforce transformed. A landmark contribution to historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, and the history of American labor, Living on the Boott demonstrates the unique power of archaeological evidence to recover the lives of those too often overlooked by conventional historical sources.

Oral histories of many of the last generation of Lowell, MA, textile mill workers preceded by two introductory sections. The first presents the historic setting of economic development and subsequent decline of the textile industry in Lowell. The second is a brief explanation of the production process wherein the last generation of mill workers expended so many of their skills and so much of their energy.

In the early nineteenth century, Lowell, Massachusetts, was widely studied and emulated as a model for capitalist industrial development. One of the first cities in the United States to experience the ravages of deindustrialization, it was also among the first places in the world to turn to its own industrial and ethnic history as a tool for reinventing itself in the emerging postindustrial economy. The Lowell Experiment explores how history and culture have been used to remake Lowell and how historians have played a crucial yet ambiguous role in that process.

The book focuses on Lowell National Historical Park, the flagship project of Lowell's new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and women's history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public history—a field that links the work of professionally trained historians with many different kinds of projects in the public realm. 

The Lowell Experiment takes an anthropological approach to public history in Lowell, showing it as a complex cultural performance shaped by local memory, the imperatives of economic redevelopment, and tourist rituals—all serving to locate the park's audiences and workers more securely within a changing and uncertain new economy characterized by growing inequalities and new exclusions. 

The paradoxical dual role of Lowell's public historians as both interpreters of and contributors to that new economy raises important questions about the challenges and limitations facing academically trained scholars in contemporary American culture. As a long-standing and well-known example of “culture-led re-development,” Lowell offers an outstanding site for exploring questions of concern to those in the fields of public and urban history, urban planning, and tourism studies.

The dramatic story of the fights and compromises that shaped an Irish community

Disdained by many Yankee residents as Catholic lowlifes, the growing Irish population of the Lowell, Massachusetts, “paddy camps” in the nineteenth century proved a tempting source of cheap labor for local mill owners, who took advantage of the immigrants’ proximity to exploit them to the fullest. Displaced by their cheaper labor, other workers blamed the Irish for job losses and added to their plight through repression and segregation.

Now in paperback and featuring a new preface, Brian C. Mitchell’s The Paddy Camps demonstrates how the Irish community in Lowell overcame adversity to develop strong religious institutions, an increased political presence, and a sense of common traditions.