Spring & Summer 2024
I am excited to be doing a program with Newport Historical Society this May!
Join me for “Grown-Up American Girl Talk” on May 4, 2024. Tickets are available now.
I will also be doing this virtual program for Essex Library Association on Thursday, July 25 at 6:30 PM (eastern).
A few years back, I had the opportunity to co-lead a working group on Freeman Tilden with Park Ranger Nick Sacco. You can see the case studies for that working group at our website, Interpreting Our Heritage.
I kept thinking about Tilden, and kept working as an interpreter, so I returned to the case study. Last year, I contributed an essay called “Tilden, Now and Then,” which will be published in this edited volume soon: A New Role for Museum Educators (Routledge, 2023).
This piece is about a seemingly minor distinction that might, in fact, make a big difference–at least in how I think we ought to interpret labor history.
I want to start with an initial insight I’ve gleaned from working at a mill museum.
Something interesting happens when you repeatedly watch people try to figure out old machines. For the most part, you see people questioning minutiae of a process they have perhaps never considered until that moment.
You can be told that a wooden spinning frame, worked by a child, could turn cotton into thread. Intellectually that’s not a lot to process. Yet it’s quite humbling to stare at a block of wood or a series of spindles and wonder how that thing makes thread, the very building block of our clothes. I enjoy watching people feel puzzled because it means that we are all going beyond a cursory understanding of textile production. The thread that we’ve largely taken entirely for granted (unless it betrays us somehow) does not in fact simply materialize into the world. People have to fine tune the materials from a dense plant into something that can become “the fabric of our lives.” I can absolutely say that I have taken a good amount of time trying to learn how such machines function. I find them fascinating and am no longer willing to call anything to do with running them “unskilled.”
Now, not everyone is terribly interested the inner workings of old textile machines. I confess I have fallen into that category, despite working at an industrial history site. What keeps me interested in this work, however, is the reality that many people do get lost in thought watching an old cotton spinning frame. I am not really sure that people need to walk away from an old mill with a deep understanding of cotton spinning, but once folks are in, many want to KNOW, with some level of depth and sophistication, how it all really works.
In the long run, I care less about how a particular machine worked and more about the imagination of the people who made the device in the first place. In spending time with people talking about early American machinery, I’ve become interested in thinking about what could have been. When Samuel Slater came to the United States in 1789, he arrived with the intention of replicating English machinery. He had an interest in enriching himself, and imagined the best way to do that was in a new country where people would let him recreate English machines and supervise children to run them. That’s mostly what he did, with his own nuances and some technical alterations. That story is pretty straightforward.
It’s important to underscore this fact: from 1790-1793, Slater and his cohort in Pawtucket built a number of early textile machines with a certain worker in mind. Child labor was a given, taken as an essential element in a system that Slater only questioned to the extent that he rejected his place in it. You’ll read all over that children’s hands were the right size for the machines. That is true, but it is right because the machines were built for children. I had been told that early textile machinery simply demanded the use of child labor. I didn’t enjoy that fact, but it seemed objectively true. What I had not considered, until I watched those puzzled faces trying to work out the machine’s operations, was that there had always been different possibilities. Slater and other industrialists in Rhode Island were starting with zero blueprints in 1790. They could have built any size machine they wished. This was the moment to make new types of machines, suited for a new country. After all, spinning at home was not the work of children. Nor was weaving, the domain of men in growing cities such as Providence.
Slater and others in the young United States wanted to build machines for children to use and of course, they were successful. But size was never really the main or only reason why these machines were made a certain way. Child workers were seen as more malleable and could be paid less. These factors should always be lined up alongside supposed preferences for hand sizes. At this point, I should add that this insight might be informed by my own size. I am 4’11” and I stand at the same height and basic comportment as when I was an eligible age for 18th century mill employment (roughly 10-14). It didn’t make sense for me to say “child sized” machines when I am standing there as an adult, the proper height for the job. Shifting exactly how I talk about this, and discussing the ethics of child labor with colleagues, has made me care less about how the machine works and more about why it was made that way in the first place.
When people were building machines for textiles in the United States for the first time, we should not forget that they had options. They could have designed systems to be worked by adults and they did chose not to, point blank. I care about this distinction in how we talk about child labor because it gets us closer to a place of honesty. Few people around the early mills cared that children faced debilitating chronic illness or injury because of work on and near these machines. They knew and we know that children were not the only populations who could have done the work. Now, looking back, it serves us as human beings to admit (out loud) that it did not have to be this way. Folks making spinners and mills from the ground up, one board of wood and gear at a time, wanted children to be at the center of their workforce.
We can’t change the fact that 10 year olds worked in New England mills. Nor should we ignore the reality that child labor continues today around the globe. However, I think that looking at these machines anew provides us with a reminder of what is made for us in this world, and what is not. Today, many of us feel alienated from the processes by which people make objects we can’t live without. Like the sizing of the spinning frames, that’s not an accident; it is by design.
There is some level of absolution in insisting that children were simply the people best suited to run spinning frames or other early machinery. But it’s not honest. Surely, someone questioned the logic of this way of manufacturing, right? Earlier in this post, I noted that few people criticized this system. But people had different ways of challenging this growing wave of industry. Many kids quit then mills early on, or their parents refused to submit to this way of life. By leaving the machines that we’ve been led to believe demanded their small hands, these young people voted with their feet.
In getting too caught up in how something worked, or in trying to weigh the morality of the past, we can lose sight of what’s always been right in front of us. This insistence that the machines were made for kids, as opposed to kids just being right for the machines, is not revisionist history. It is perhaps a slightly different perspective. However, if we are to credit these early innovative industrialists with such genius, can we not also ask why their visions for work were so narrow, and so constrained?
The damage done by this system was apparent to some even in the 1830s. Thomas Mann wrote a brutal and lengthy poem about Pawtucket near the end of Samuel Slater’s life. This diatribe is called Picture of a Factory Village. Mann has this note for his peers: “The memory of the founder of cotton factories should be held in contempt by the present generation, and execrated to the remotest ages of posterity.” Quite the opposite has happened in the intervening centuries.
Seeing just one full generation go through life in a factory was enough for Mann. It makes me wonder what would be enough for us to demand an end to child labor today.
“Is this place haunted?”
When you work in an old mill building, as I do, people ask you this question a lot.
Sometimes I say no, but only after waiting a beat and remembering to smile. I try to soften the fact that I have given a one word answer. This is never the end of the conversation, anyway.
More often, I skip the no, and instead, I hedge a bit. I acknowledge that many people are curious about who or what may be haunting the old mill museums in and around New England. As I am giving this answer, I can usually sense that none of us will leave this conversation satisfied.
I don’t think I’ve ever come right out and said yes, yes it is haunted–much to the disappointment of those who profess a deep interest in meeting the dead while on a field trip or vacation.
For what it’s worth, I do actually believe in ghosts. Yet when I am asked about the spiritual world at work, I find that I often stumble, wondering how I can best express myself. On the inside, my mind is reeling. I am thinking: yes, no, maybe…how could there not be ghosts? Also: what are they really asking? Am I being filmed? On the outside, I am doing my best to look unaffected. I could scoff at this question, dismissing it entirely, but I won’t, because too much is at stake.
For more than half my life, I have worked in a range of interesting historic buildings and structures, from mansions to mills. At every single one of them, people have wanted to know if there are ghosts among us on the tour. To be clear, I am not paid to lead ghost tours and never have been. At the mill where I lead tours now, there are no signs or advertisements promising such things, either. No one on my team is paid to put on a costume or to do jump scares. Still, people ask about hauntings all the time. Visitors wonder aloud about the presence or absence of ghosts, and sometimes more specifically, the ghosts of children. They do this as if it were the most mundane thing in the world, in line with asking about the location of the bathroom.
Occasionally, very patient visitors wait until the end of the tour to pull me aside. They ask me about ghosts in a hushed tone, not wanting to cause any panic among the others. To these people, I often affirm that they’ve asked a good question. I also explain that the answer is more complex than just a yes or a no. Some have just seen a ghost hunting show and are eager to know what’s real and what’s not. I can’t say I blame them, because I also have that instinct.
To be clear, it’s not unreasonable for people to want to ask someone they perceive to be an on-site expert about ghosts. After all, visitors get told many times to ask me, the guide, a question about anything, anytime. When I say that, I mean it. So, this is not a complaint about the fact that people boldly ask about ghosts and hauntings (really, it’s kind of an honor that they can trust me to ask at all). Instead, this is a reflection on why I feel so consistently conflicted in how I craft an answer. Getting asked about ghosts is common for most people who work at historic sites. Yet I rarely see people acknowledge the deep ambivalence many of us carry about how we reply.
Since 2016, I’ve done historical interpretation work at industrial history sites. Whether the building is brick or wood, standing strong or falling apart, people want to know what kind of spirits are stuck there, and whether the humans once employed on the site ever suffered. The short answer to the latter question is that yes, unfortunately, they did. People dealt with pain and loss in the places where we stand on the tour. It’s not a pleasant fact, but it is a true fact. From that common ground, some visitors make the leap to presume that there are ghosts. For them, there’s a direct connection between suffering and haunting: if someone died in the mill, they might still be around, lingering while assigned to an interminable shift for the ages. I hope they are not, but really, what do I know?
I do feel more confident in how to talk about work in the mill and the ways of the machines. When we are on those topics, I try to make the real people who used or made them feel real. At least once a day, this leads us to talking about things that are honestly somewhat grotesque. I find that people are fascinated by injuries sustained by workers in factories and mills. A simple explanation for this trend might be that people are drawn to the macabre. I don’t find that fully satisfying, however–-it’s too neat, and really, dismissive. I give people more credit.
Let me explain further. At a historic site where I was previously employed in Lowell, MA, a video of workers’ experiences in local factories would play on a loop. This video included intense and frankly, graphic descriptions of workplace incidents. Upon hearing these stories, some people would seem shocked or upset. It was not uncommon to hear visitors in the museum gasping when certain oral histories would play aloud. Notably, this museum also has a copy of an old log book with short descriptions of workers’ injuries. I never heard anyone gasp around that panel. Considering the abstract idea of people being hurt at work is different from hearing about it from a firsthand witness, a person brought to life on a screen. What people think they want to know and what they are scared to learn are often overlapping topics.
Anyway, back to the present. At the 1793 mill where I do tours now, children ran the machines. None of those early laborers can speak directly for themselves on the tour. There are no recordings to play, no photographs to show of their lost childhoods. We’ll never know for sure what it was like to hear them laugh or how they smiled when the day was done. We have to do the hard work of imagining, for there are no magic tricks I can deploy to easily conjure them. No, the stories my colleagues and I share are built on evidence: primary sources and other records. Reading those can offer their own kind of eerie feelings, but that’s a conversation for another time.
It’s important that you know that a lot of people come to this mill already aware that children worked there. Many visitors first came years ago on a field trip, and that fact has stuck with them. After conceding that they seem to have forgotten most other details, some will ask about kids getting hurt. Years later, they feel compelled to share that they remember a story, sketchy now, about a child losing a finger or hand. Was that true, they ask? If so, how often did such things happen?
Folks looking to make a real, human connection with the past are likely to bring up what they already know. It’s natural to be curious about what happens when something goes wrong. But here’s what is most troubling to me. I’ve lost count of how many people say that this kind of story (a literal horror story) is the only thing they remember about the mill. This is why I am extremely careful when I choose my words about the harm that children endured. I know that if I talk about injuries and accidents in the mills, people may remember what I say for years or a lifetime.
This context might help us understand the fixation on whether the place is haunted or not. Sometimes, I think that people are bringing up these stories because it is too hard to ask other questions instead. By resurrecting a vague recollection of loss or injury, we don’t have to think about any individual children. Such stories almost never include a name or other details. They are true enough to be credible but not grounded in hard facts. Talking about ghosts or a mysterious missing digit (not attached to a real, documented person) invites visitors to stay in the world of abstractions. This comes with its own dangers, for this allows us all to sidestep the question whether any of the mill itself was worth it. We don’t have to say, out loud, in broad daylight: did children really lose their lives to make spools of thread a bit faster? The truth is that children are still put in harm’s way, today, now, to achieve this same end.
I don’t want to diminish the fact that many visitors really do seem concerned with how difficult this place was for working children. Some also want to speak to the problems with fast fashion today, drawing a connection between the children of the past and the child laborers who work today. The fact that I can interact with people for an extended period of time and talk these things through is part of what makes in-person tours important. These discussions are different from what takes place in other public spaces, like the internet. I can hear the tone of someone’s voice and study their affect when they probe to learn more about how kids were treated more than 200 years ago. Experience has taught me that people are often keen to empathize with these children.
This is why I am so alarmed by the sharpness and power of unfounded stories about death and injuries. Over time, when other details about working in the mills have faded away, visitors take what they can remember and make those facts the only facts worth knowing. Some also jump to conclusions. If all they can recall was someone getting hurt, certainly that means that children were suffering horrific injuries, and dying, all the time. People share this idea with me so casually, as if it is not something almost too terrible to contemplate. But we can see how it happens. A complex song becomes a simple melody, repeated and fine tuned into a single note. At last, the truth becomes elusive to them, and the people who did face real pain are lost, silenced by the din created among fictional ghosts.
Other Ghosts
I’ve been interested in when and why people want to talk about death and dying on tours for a long time. Recently, a friend reminded me of a conversation we’d had years ago during a visit to Atlanta, Georgia. We’d been talking about the function of ghost tours, and of course, we also paid to take one downtown. That night, we wondered what ghost tours were really about, and why we went on them at all. Many ghost tours, we surmised, served as safety valves. They made space for guides to talk about topics not discussed elsewhere, topics regarded as “too dark.” In part, we’d concluded that a ghost tour was a place to learn what local people might regard as something to feel guilty about, whether that was a singular act such as a murder or a systemic problem such as slavery or child labor. As other historians have pointed out, challenging histories should not be relegated to “dark” tours. Yet there is something about the framing of a ghost tour that has allowed people to delve deeper into histories that might be ignored otherwise. Maybe all guides just need a cape and a lantern to signal to visitors that the history they’ll be hearing is about to take a turn away from what was in their tenth grade textbooks.
While I explicitly don’t offer ghost tours, that doesn’t stop people from looking for them on a daily basis. I think this is partially because I do acknowledge the real problems and dangers within these industrial workspaces. In a perverse way, I sometimes feel as if I am disappointing people with the truth, which is that children were not being maimed and hurt constantly. The workers whose lives we discuss in great detail rose with the sun and spent most of their waking hours in front of mind numbing machines until a bell dismissed them. Some did get hurt by the machines they were paid to tend. There were moments of genuine trauma when workers of any age were injured on the job. It was horrible and difficult, but not the stuff of a manufactured haunted house.
There’s even more nuance when we talk about disease as opposed to injury. Tracing exactly why or how someone got sick or hurt in a mill was not always easy. Generally, though, workers knew what was happening to them, and insisted on better treatment, even when trusted authorities dismissed their concerns. Andrew Ure, writing about the early machinery used in England, explained: “Arkwright’s water frames were built very low in the spindle-boxes to accommodate children, and consequently sometimes caused deformity, by the frequent act of stooping.” Usually, machines were made for children (it was not coincidental that children were the right size) but they were not made for children to work comfortably. In her study of gothic literature about mills, Bridget Marshall recounts the story of Moses Heap, a child laborer in England who remembered being kept awake by “an effigy, the full size of a man, made of cotton, and when required, was carried around the room on a man’s back to waken us all up.” Some nightmares happen in the bright light of day, as it turns out.
Closer to home, one of Samuel Slater’s employees, a widow named Rebecca Cole, became ill. He’d heard that she wanted to leave Pawtucket, and that she “wished she had not come.” Death brought her to the mills, and now she might have feared that living among them could be her own undoing. Around this time, Josiah Quincy wrote about his visit to the growing village. He saw the young workers, children like Rebecca’s own, as “little creatures, plying in a contracted room, among flyers and coggs, at an age when nature requires them for air, space, and sports. There was a dull dejection in the countenances of all of them.” Note the lack of dramatic scene setting, the lack of outright violence. One hundred children or more in a wooden mill building, standing in front of machines all day was simply…sad.
What often goes unsaid in stories about the dangers of mill work is the fact that some of the damage took time. Standing in front of spinning frames, people are curious about missing digits or lacerations. What they do not ask about is the long-term effects of breathing in polluted, lint and cotton dust filled air for 10-14 hours a day. Nor do they inquire about the loss of hearing that came with being around machines and energy systems that were almost too loud to contemplate. These are not the kind of scary stories they have been taught to consume in a mill. I am hoping to change that.
Recently, a child on a tour bluntly asked me if a girl had died in the building, right under here in the wheel pit, and if so, whether she haunted the mill. This was a question inspired by a worksheet he was holding in his hand. I actually shuddered at the thought.
Here’s part of what I told him. People have died in wheel pits and in mill accidents. Take Freelove, a woman who “fell in the wheelpit of the mill and drowned,” elsewhere in Rhode Island. Freelove Greene was born in the 1790s and died in March 1839. She was one of eleven children born to Stephen and Sarah Greene. Her family took the time to have the description of her death put on her gravestone, for all to remember. Death in a mill–death anywhere–was not a casual thing. It should not be talked about casually now, either. Now, imagine wanting to find that these children’s spirits, or some semblance of their humanity, might remain trapped in the mill. Imagine wanting to hear their cries, again, for entertainment.
One of the challenges we face at my workplace is that we are asked questions about fantastical ghosts that actually require answers about flawed human beings. While I do believe in ghosts, I hope to never encounter them. I spend enough of my time talking about people who happen to be dead. Historians don’t usually describe their work this way, but it’s part of what’s always pulled me into the craft. I get the privilege of trying to understand people who are no longer with us and for the most part, this means digging deep into the stories of mill workers who have long since passed away. While these people are gone, I want to believe they are present through the work that we do that honors their lives. I think they can still speak to us through documents shoved in old file folders, through notches in wood they’ve carved, and in the deep grooves in floorboards, made ever so slowly by feet moving back and forth, flesh and bone bound to the earth.
As I write this, it’s late October, 2022. People are especially curious about ghosts.
Earlier today, a coworker finished the last tour of the weekend. “Guess what they asked me at the end,” he said. It was not hard to guess.
When I talk about people who cannot share their own stories, I strive to give answers that are humane and authentic, and above all else, true. For that reason, this simple, direct question about whether the place I work in is haunted poses a challenge for me. The reality is that I find all of the labor history we discuss rather haunting. I am disturbed by the way a machine can disrupt or end a life. We can do justice to these workers by remembering them beyond these snapshots of suffering; by making them fully human, and not just hazy special visions.
Overall, I am heartened by the fact that visitors come and ask questions about people they will never meet on this earthly plane. I appreciate that we have a space to commune with them, to speak of their existence. The young, often vulnerable children who labored and lived in truly harsh circumstances in these mills deserved more in life. The least we can do now is honor them and try to know them, in death.
In this way, I am happy that we don’t need to dwell only on details of their sadness. We can also use the space they labored in to showcase living artists and to teach children fortunate enough to be in school. That leads me to this story. A few months ago, during a summer evening program, I got asked about hauntings at a rate that was unusual for that time of year. It was a busy night, and by the end of the program, the moon seemed to be hanging right behind the bell tower of the mill. It was a stunning sight, giving the landscape a glow I hadn’t seen before or since. A very kind, thoughtful performer chatted with me about the success and energy of the performances. She also asked me what I really thought about ghosts.
“Is this place haunted?”
I’d already answered this question many times that night.
I looked at her, face to face, and without blinking, told her, of course.
This is a presentation essay I prepared for a conference in April 2021.
My talk today is about public history in the “COVID Era” — it is also about larger questions of relevance, service, and presentism. Over the past year, my day-to-day work as a public historian has changed to a degree that continues to surprise me. I became a public historian because I believe in the power of place. I wanted to work with people in and among landscapes that give us the room to step out of the present to understanding something universal about what it means to be human. On a practical level, this has meant having engaging discussions in auditoriums, on canal boats, in large mansions, and on the creaky floorboards of stuffy historic homes. Now, as with most people, I primarily connect with others through the internet. While this has allowed me to make new and far-flung contacts, I have also missed the sparks that come from directly interfacing with people in historic spaces. Before delving further into these topics, I want to talk about context.
As I write this, more than 562,000 people in the United States have died from Coronavirus. I am starting with this fact, a kind of simple statement, because I don’t know anyone who hasn’t experienced great loss in the past year. Every one of us has had to adjust our lives in one way or many ways, and all of us have some awareness of this daunting figure. At the beginning of the pandemic, archivists, historians, and other practitioners of public history encouraged individuals, families, and communities to keep records of their lives in and out of quarantine. This may have seemed like a contained ask: an ideal spring or summer project for people spending more time inside, away from other activities. It felt like a promising moment to begin keeping a diary, or family log of new activities. I don’t want to diminish that moment by claiming there was novelty to it, but there was a sense that this was a small window of time worth remembering.
A year later, we have many more deaths, a general exhaustion with quarantine, and few outlets or spaces set aside for mourning what haunts us. On national level, it was nearly a year into the pandemic before a leading figure called for a large-scale event for memorialization. Then President-elect Joseph Biden honored the first 400,000 on January 19, 2021 while acknowledging that “For many months, we have grieved by ourselves.” This event was for the dead and for the living; truly, a small gesture for the many who have suffered. None of this was expected or inevitable, and it remains hard to imagine talking about public history here and now without pausing for grief. That word can refer to grief in the sense of pain, the misery of feeling such sadness. Grief can also refer to a bother. This duality is well suited to discussions of Coronavirus. Many institutions, and many of our media outlets, have had less and less time and space for dealing with grief, as if it was simply in the way of “real life.” Despite this reluctance to face hard facts, we are indeed in a COVID era, and not just the throes of a pandemic.
Historians know that there was a similar nonresponse to the Flu Pandemic in the 19-teens and 1920s. There was no great halting of society, no mass memorialization, and a hundred years later, still few markers of that pandemic. Warren G. Harding didn’t create the term normalcy, but he certainly did bring it to the fore of American consciousness. We, too, have already heard those calls for a return to normal, and for what used to seem comfortable. With our historians’ brains, we might understand why people might find elements of the recent past a more alluring place. Still, we know that we cannot return to how the world used to be. One of the great challenges we face in moving forward is not just thinking about how we will all co-exist in close proximity again, but how we will recreate broken social bonds. Without openly and repeatedly talking about who we have lost, we cannot truly fathom the pain our audiences will be feeling for years to come.
This is not just because of the pandemic. The acts of violence against Black Americans, Asian Americans, and the attempted coup in January 2021 have taken a cumulative toll and further traumatized communities already under siege within systems of white supremacy.
When studying History, you may have wondered how people made it through other moments, particularly difficult ones. Now you know that the mundane acts of life seem to press on through moments of great upheaval. You have learned that even amidst marches of thousands in the streets and reports of mass burials, the world seems to keep going, and many are quick to smooth over the roughest edges of what others have just been through. Clint Smith has a poem that speaks to this: “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” He writes, “We are not all left standing after the war has ended. Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.”
Historians know that the people who remain have power over the stories we tell. Yet this past year has heightened my awareness (and I think others’) of the fact that a shared experience is still experienced radically differently. While we all have some level of fatigue surrounding these topics, reimagining of our field still demands a sharp focus on what we’ve been seeing, feeling, and living through, right up to now. This means honing a clearer and more sustained view of the present than most public historians have been trained to cultivate. In June 2020, The Brooklyn Museum posted a tweet about needing to postpone a regularly scheduled program. In solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the museum decided to “honor the space that our collective grief requires…” (June 5, 2020) In a more recent tweet, one of their social media authors wrote, “As we surpass the one year anniversary of the pandemic, we’re thinking about how exhausting this extended crisis has been and how we can seek rest even as we persevere.” (March 21, 2021)
In such a small number of characters, this post models empathy, relevance, and a sense of community. This tweet also succinctly frames much of what has been happening within and around cultural institutions—the “extended crisis” that has seeped into our culture. Usually, a historical essay would not rely so much on very recent newspaper articles and social media posts. However, public history discourse is changing quickly and evolving online. My professional world (and probably yours, too) has gotten both smaller and more global through the web. In thinking about the state of the field or a “reimagining,” I want to situate the importance of these kinds of platforms and what it might mean for the future of our work.
Overall, people who work within public history have had to use virtual platforms much more to communicate with their audiences. Before last spring, I had never done a Facebook Live program, used Webex, or hosted an event on Zoom. What’s more, I had not known how to edit videos or write captions. Within a few months, however, I learned how to do all these things, and more, together with my colleagues. I spent more and more time in front of a screen, communicating through texts, emails, and other chats more than before. Instead of serendipitous interactions with the public, I was reviewing comments online and answering messages.
There were some upsides, particularly before screen burnout became so acute. In lieu of a carpet storytime face-to-face, I could read on Facebook live. This allowed me to reach an audience that may not come into the park. Likewise, I was able to expand the audience for facilitated dialogue programs using virtual platforms. Though “Hands-on” programs went to the wayside, in their place, we experimented with how we could reach people through screens. Since we couldn’t hand out the thousands of trading cards we’d made on local leaders for the 19th Amendment centennial, using the same research, we worked on videos featuring those women. Those videos have reached more than the sum of cards we printed.
While focusing on virtual media, we also thought about how to address the pandemic and/or histories of public health. A discussion on the flu pandemic or medical history did not seem quite right for our audience, not yet. Then the New York Times published the headline “US Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss,” followed by the list of names, and that seemed to finally grab ahold of people’s attention. In response, activists Adrianne Benzion and Jessica McEwan used that same format for “The Incalculable Loss Project” to highlight “names with those of unarmed African Americans who died during incidents of police brutality.” These initiatives spurred me and my colleagues to look anew at another public health crisis. Using obituaries from Robert John Quinn’s “Memorial Books” collected during the AIDS epidemic, we made a one minute video on local men who’d died as a result of the disease and used the framework of an “incalculable loss.”
While working on digital media, I had the chance to connect with new partners, such as The History Project: Documenting LGBTQ Boston, whose team preserved the Quinn “Memorial Books.” In addition to building outside relationships, I know that my institution was not alone in using some of this “doors closed” time to further develop research that had been sitting in various desktop folders. My work group spent months making app-based tours. I was also able to contribute to a few similar local projects, and to work on a “ghost sign” initiative, recreating a painted advertisement from the bygone patent medicine era. All these projects were portable, personal, and generally far more accessible. They also did not require the direct guidance or interpretation of a professional, and could be read, watched, or consumed at any time. Even when the doors were closed, we were still able to build interpretive connections with people, wherever they might find themselves.
While building new relationships, I was seeing new or different risks, too; there were pervasive fears of intrusions on Zoom, and the lack of trust that can pervade an online space. There was also far more “backend” work with editing, audio descriptions, captions, and more. I’ve been doing social media work as part of my job for many years and continue to do that interpretive work on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. What changed in 2020 is that I was doing more of it than ever before and spending far more time on in-depth research posts. I was also showing more people how to do this kind of interpretation, often in lieu of presenting to the public on tours or at historic sites. People who had not really thought of social media or digital media as part of their work were suddenly asked to learn a lot of new skills. I saw this not only at my own workplace, but at so many institutions whose work I follow online. On one level, it is extremely gratifying to reach thousands of people with something you’ve written on Facebook, though the true reach of that work is often quite hard to measure.
While I’d like to portray this as a great moment in diversifying skill sets, there’s another element to this story. Walking to my car in late March 2020, I recall hearing news that ⅓ of museums that closed their doors “out of an abundance of caution” would likely never open again. Often, people had to learn new skills last year because they had missing colleagues and their entire workplace had been turned upside down. With layoffs, staff shrinkages, and more, people had to suddenly adapt to new workloads without the benefit of the teams they’d had even a month earlier. At least at the start of the pandemic, I wasn’t hearing that much about this (in a way that felt productive) on a national, or organizational level. Where I was reading about this was through the personal feeds of people I knew and respected in the field. Over a few months, I continued to see news about institutions closing their doors, more layoffs, hiring freezes, and “eliminated positions.”
As some people packed for telework, some people packed their things for good, and others had no choice but to keep showing up for work. Sometimes it was hard to discern a real pattern, or logic, in who was doing what, and why. Many people in the museum field also had this sense of fear, I think, about what was coming next. Then a larger story broke. At one especially well-known museum where interpreters frequently discuss labor and activism, there were two competing narratives last summer about what needed to be done to keep the place afloat. On the one hand, the Tenement Museum was actively campaigning for financial support, emphasizing how important it was to preserve stories of working-class people and resistance. On the other hand, workers fought back against the narrative that their layoffs were the only path forward. Tenement Museum union representatives argued that “the pandemic closure is being used as an opportunity to circumvent our unionization [.]” (July 31, 2020) This was not an isolated case.
Through April and May, I read posts written by people who loved their jobs and either feared or knew they’d never get them back. I felt as though I was watching a field shrink in real time; I’m sure I’m not alone. Over the past year, it’s been hard to know why some institutions are opening or closing at any given time. For some, it’s too expensive to stay closed, and for others, too much to open the doors with so few people coming through each day. In a New York Times article from February 2021, “Is Seeing That Renoir Essential?” Julia Jacobs reports: “Epidemiologists do not have a simple answer as to whether museums should be open — and whether people should visit them — at this stage of the pandemic.” Overall, “‘The decision making has been really erratic,’ said Laura Lott, president of the American Alliance of Museums.”
This is not really a surprise given how “erratic” and uncoordinated the response to COVID-19 has been in general. The question in the NYT headline can be readily answered: no, seeing a Renoir painting isn’t essential. But many other “non-essential” operations have also been open almost without interruption. Museums area also treated differently than other kinds of public spaces. The relationships people have to museums and public history sites are different, in part, because we insist (and often work to have others agree) that these are special places. The American Alliance of Museums put out a tweet on March 24: “The ways a #museum can inspire are endless: acting as a hub for education, providing services to those in need during crises, combatting social isolation, providing space and resources for healing, and more.” I think this can be true, but I also wonder if we prepared to do that without a longer and deeper reckoning—or another reorientation away from heavy reliance on screens and virtual work.
We are torn, in many ways, I think between the reality of the pandemic and the deep wish that this period of grief come to a close. Many of us have to balance the pull of the virtual with the needs of visitors walking through the doors. As visitors arrive in greater numbers each day, it’s useful to ask why, and to consider what they are looking for, or what they need. People in the fields of parks, recreation, and museums talk a lot and often in vague terms about the healing qualities of art and nature. We also discuss the value of community. It has been surprising to me that there has not been more of a conversation about the value of museums as places to “escape” this current moment, but that is because these places are as much doors as mirrors. As with many other facets of society, the deeply embedded systems of racism and white supremacy that are endemic to our culture are also prevalent in public history: “23% of visitors to the parks were people of color, the National Park Service found in its most recent 10-year survey; 77% were white.” One article aptly called this “an existential crisis.” (“Existential Crisis” July 2020)
Truly processing the grief not just of the past year, but of the traumas that have been inflicted on many Americans for hundreds of years, requires careful work. It also means listening so much more to communities online, and to people who have historically been marginalized and even kept out of “public” spaces for our so-called “shared” heritage. I think this also requires a hyper attentiveness to the context in which we are all living and using our skills to better understand our world as it is now. While training to become a historian, I was warned about presentism. I still agree with the idea that we should not rush to judgments or evaluations of the past based on values or common assumptions from today. However, I am increasingly convinced that some of this thinking is rooted in a fear of making certain audiences uncomfortable, particularly audiences who have long been made to feel safe/supported at historic sites. Put another way, sometimes a caution about presentism is really a fear of recognizing or reckoning with historical injustices or changing the demographics of who comes through the door.
In 2019, I hosted a community dialogue on “race and place,” and considering the industrial north and the history of slavery. As part of that talk, I had the opportunity to interview Maiyah Gamble-Rivers (from the Center for Slavery and Social Justice, Brown University). She said something I won’t soon forget about teaching and public history: “actually learning true history or a more complex history, it leaves a lot of young people frustrated and angry, right?” When speaking to young people who go to a school named after a person who profited off the slave trade, Gamble-Rivers explains, “what would it mean for me to then show up to students at middle school and say, ‘Oh, your school is named after the slave ship captain, he did X, Y and Z.’ I can’t just drop that on them and then and then expect them to continue…there definitely needs to be a conversation about how we equip educators to do that work, but also how do we prepare students for that knowledge? Because so much of our education has been about preserving myths and preserving this country.”
With more than half a million dead, we should think daily about the myths that serve a system that does not serve all of us. In my work as an interpreter, I often paraphrase Joe Hill and discuss the ways that workers have mourned and organized. Looking broadly at public history, it’s a good as time as any to do both of those things. I think museums and public history sites can be spaces for healing, but not by ignoring the hurt or the racism that has been deeply rooted in the field. When museum directors post job advertisements seeking candidates who will suit their “traditional, core, white art audience” (“White Art Audience,” February 2021) it’s hard to justify such places as essential during a pandemic. Although some institutions have gone beyond diversity and equity statements, I suspect a good number will avoid, or will lack the staff to undertake, such work.
I want to end by talking about the value of working with people who aren’t historians, or public historians. On one of my Facebook live programs, a group of artists reached out to me to work on a musical about a workers’ petition. This chat evolved into one of the most satisfying collaborations I have ever been part of — the end product, an EP, features songs that so wonderfully bridge the past and present. A creative cast of women artists took something that’s been covered in endless books and articles and gave it a new pulse. The first time I was able to listen to the EP in the museum space that inspired the songs, I cried. It felt good to do something human in a place where people have worked, mourned, and organized for hundreds of years. I hope that more people are able to join me in that, soon, and that we can talk about the way these years have changed us.
Earlier this year, I got to write a piece for Contingent Magazine about my work as a public historian. Check it out!
(continued from the previous post)
Upon finding these sources, I wanted to know where else I might find evidence of people discussing harassment in and out of the workplace. A great source on many topics is The Lowell Offering, a magazine made by and for factory operatives from 1840-1845. Harriet Farley, one of the magazine’s editors, wrote the following in 1845: “Another evil, to which factory girls may possibly be subjected, is, that of ‘flirtation,’ or insincere courtship.” Coming to a new place, these young women “are afar from fathers and brothers, that they are ignorant of the gallantries, and even of the courtesies of city gentlemen, that they are young, guileless, and confiding, it may be imagined that much unhappiness—to use the gentlest term—is the result.” Farley is making it clear that far from the idyllic picture painted by many corporation owners, women were not always secure in Lowell. She also notes, however, that not all women who entered into relationships were “fallen” women: “We will not allude to those errors were both are equally guilty, where there is no confidence betrayed; where there was no fall, because there was no elevation of character.” (282)
Historian Peter Baldwin gives us more context for “insincere” attention in his study, In the Watches of the Night. Focusing on women’s after-work hours, Baldwin notes that “women felt safe on the streets of Lowell because of their large numbers and the relative scarcity of men. Women in their twenties made up fully 25 percent of Lowell’s population in 1840, outnumbering men that age more than two to one. Teenage girls outnumbered teenage boys more than three to one.” While one contemporary observer noted that “at a given point on Central or Merrimack streets, for half an hour, of a pleasant evening, and probably two to three thousand people would pass him…three fourths are female” (39) women still did not always feel safe even in such large numbers. Baldwin argues, “Lowell women learned to avoid passing certain street corners or saloons.” (40) Late at night, “When the streets grew nearly deserted after the 10:00 p.m. curfew in the boardinghouses, young men drifted to the backstreet taverns or to brothels on the fringe of town.” (40)
On one end of the spectrum, I was finding evidence of undesired attention. On the other, I was soon discovering, were cases of extreme violence that were held up as examples. In instances were men violently abused or even murdered women, however, the lesson was not for men, but for women. In analyzing this aspect of the history, I took particular care with reading Elizabeth A. De Wolfe’s Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories. This provided a context for understanding acts of violence (broadly defined) in “new” factory towns in New England in the 19th century. De Wolfe notes that with the high profile case of Sarah Cornell, her “death challenged mill agents’ claims that factory life was safe for the first generation of factory girls.” (57) Cornell wasn’t alone, either–there was also the case of Caroline Adams in Lawrence, MA and Berengera Caswell (1850).
On the one hand, mill girls read “prescriptive literature” which “asserted that once a woman began to turn away from virtue, there was no escape from ruin.” (23) Yet women like Caswell, who’d worked in Lowell then Manchester, NH (49) knew that life was not so black and white. They read about “menstrual regulators” in newspapers (25) and knew that in cases of consensual and non-consensual relationships, some women sought abortions. In Caswell’s instance, it was a badly performed abortion that led to her death and tragically, the dumping of her body in Saco, Maine. Caswell as found after a thaw. Descendants claimed she died in an ice skating accident. De Wolfe elegantly reminds us that her “life of independence and labor in the textile factories was erased and replaced with the memory of Berry in the heart of her domestic circle, a passive, and innocent victim once more.” (59) A sanitized view of the past makes no room for the lives of these women, nor for the kind of struggles they faced. This is why, more than a century later, we can imagine the Me Too movement as an entirely novel phenomenon.
There are still a few more Lowell sources worth exploring. Closer to home, Lowell operatives knew that some women took their own lives in situations of crisis. In 1849, Orrilla Durrell’s choice to die in a canal in a tightly packed city must have been highly traumatic for other operatives. Officially, she was “jilted” by a man in town; we cannot know the truth of their relationship or what she was really facing in that moment. De Wolfe provides excellent context for how this story was disseminated here. But in using these kinds of histories for a public program, it is important to remember that detailed, place-based anecdotes are not told simply for their own sake. We use stories in a public forum like a community conversation to reveal something specific and universal. Sitting in an old cotton mill, with a canal still flowing outside, it is important to pause, to consider what it must have been like (truly, the horror) of finding a colleague in desperation and crisis who chose to end her life in the rush of the power source of the city.
Karen Abbott’s work on mashing and harassment reminds us that these incidents are about control. As women came into new workplaces in large numbers, they knew their place financially; the best paid woman made less than any man. Yet these acts of violence and violation cut deeper. With mashing, Abbott explains, “Beneath the surface, the threat is there, letting women know that if they wanted more freedoms to venture out into society, then they would have to deal with this sort of attention. Mashing was a way to put women back in ‘their places’ and police their activity, decisions, and whereabouts.”
By way of conclusion, I want to honor the important work of historian Mary Blewett, who conducted the many interviews that served as the basis for both her book, The Last Generation, and much of the interpretive material at Lowell NHP. History may not repeat itself, but it does echo. In a city known for working women, Blewett notes that in the 1940s, it was still a shock for men to see women working at night. She argues, “To many men, the women who worked in the mills during World War II as slashers or for the first time on the night shift seemed a degraded and unsavory group.” (152) Once again, even being out at night was seen as an indictment of one’s character and in some cases, an opening for indecent conduct. It was no secret either, and we must not forget that. Prominent men who owned factories “were well aware of the sexual harassment of women by supervisors, which was one good reason to see to it that wives or daughters never entered the mill.” (154) One of the workers who is quoted in the book, and in the exhibit says simply: “the boys used to get away with murder!”
Perhaps the most chilling words in her book are these: “those whose memories were too painful refused to be interviewed.” (xvii) There are the stories we know, that we must grapple with, and many, many more that we will never know. Thus, we ended our program with a reflection on how we might think about “mill girls” and all workers differently. We handed out little slips of paper, encouraging people to share anything there that they had not wanted to say out loud. Several people wrote the two words that launched a new social movement. Several more wrote another two-word phrase: thank you.
On October 15, 2017, Alyssa Milano took to Twitter and encouraged “women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted” to write just two words: “Me too.” This, she hoped, would “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem”–and it did. What is now referred to as the Me Too Movement began a decade earlier, not in Hollywood but with activist Tarana Burke. It was her words that provided the foundation, and Milano’s high profile status, that ignited a firestorm and a reckoning that continues today.
Almost exactly one year after Milano hit send on her tweet, the museum I work in hosted a community conversation on the history of sexual harassment. The title for this talk had slipped out of my mouth months earlier. Walking through the exhibits, noisy keys dangling from my carabiner, I imagined a program entitled “Mill Girl, Me Too.” This idea came to fruition in October 2018, serving as the first dialogue in a series called Lowell Talks.
When Lowell National Historical Park was first authorized by Congress more than 40 years ago, sexual harassment as we understand it today was finally being openly discussed in the context of the workplace. This site was created, in part, to tell worker’s stories, and especially women’s stories, in the contexts of labor and immigration history. From the beginning, the park’s signature museum has included placards with workers’ words, verbatim, as well as a series of videos with oral histories. One of the placards in the weave room includes the words of a worker who experienced frequent harassment. It is popular to talk about “hidden” or “missing” histories as if the past is a balloon that slips from our fingers on a windy hilltop. This story was right here, all along, and this was the time to better understand who among her colleagues might have added “me, too” to her words.
The program we put together was not a lecture–it was a dialogue. One of the goals of this was to achieve a better shared understanding of sexual harassment as a historical problem and as an aspect of the lived experience today. To ensure that we had the right expertise in the room, we invited Isa Woldeguiorguis, a community leader and nationally recognized expert on anti-violence who serves as the Executive Director of The Center for Hope and Healing. After a question and answer period between me and Ms. Woldeguiorguis, we planned for the rest of the program to be a facilitated group dialogue. We followed the guidelines set out out by the Sites of Conscience, and heeded Sarah Pharaon’s statement: “Essential museums cannot fear being perceived as political in a world where all actions are becoming politicized.”
There is only so much that one can prepare in anticipation of a group dialogue. Simply put, you don’t know who will be coming, what stories they may want to share, or where the conversation will go. What I want to share here is how I prepared for this discussion. If our guest was going to serve as an expert on the issue from a contemporary perspective, I wanted to be able to provide the historical background and context.
Here is some of what I read to get a sense of the scope of the problem of harassment today: Pew Research & Hidden Activists. This gave me a balanced look at the impact of Milano’s work AND the labor of working-class women fighting against systems of harassment today.
I then turned to the work of historians who were looking at this issue from a longer perspective. I especially recommend this article: Molly Brookfield, “Why It’s Bad When It’s ‘Not That Bad’” Nursing Clio May 1, 2018. Brookfield explains:
“At the turn of the twentieth century, women began to campaign against ‘mashers’ and ‘male flirts,’ men who accosted women in city streets. While ‘mashing,’ like street insults, involved all sorts of annoying and threatening behaviors, commentary on the phenomenon often latched on to looking, ogling, or leering as the most bothersome behavior.”
Here’s why this article was especially important. It gave me a period-specific term to research: mashing. If you are looking for the history of harassment with that term, you won’t find very much. As a quick aside, the term “sexual harassment” wasn’t widely used until the 1970s, with Sexual Shakedown.
Next, I looked back through my general resources on “mill girls” to build something of a profile for this program. Per Thomas Dublin’s research in Women and Work, Mill girls generally: married later and married differently from their rural peers. They were also entering a veritable “world of women” upon coming to Lowell, where women might outnumber men 3:1 in certain contexts. Did this make them more or less vulnerable?
I decided to go back to the words written by early mill operatives to find some of my answers. A letter that had struck me as odd some months ago came back into my memory. On March 3, 1852, Eliza Bixby wrote the following to her brother:
“I am glad Lydia has made up her mind to go and earn her own living but I am sorry very sorry she has been so regardless of my advice to her about going top that mill I have worked there before her…one objection which is greater than all the rest is that she has gone to work for Mr H- for he is one of the greatest villains I ever got acauinted with without exceptions I summered and wintered there before I even dreamed of his character which proved to be to seduce every innocent girl that was in his power let me tell you of one instance of his artfulness”
Later: “he beconed to me to come sit on his knee I refused….he locked the door then seated himself by my side and took that ring off his finger and put it on mine…then put his arm around me clinching both of my wrists put his face over my nose so I could not breathe through it. At the same time sucking my breath from my mouth untill [sic] I became so exasted I lay me down on the sofa at that moment a rap at the door stoped his career…
Call me a baby for being [willing] left alone yet do not expose me out of the family I told you this as proof of Mr H—character and this is but one instance they are two numerous to mention yet he is a mon of good qualities I fear they are very few that him that he has not tried to rob of there Chastity I wish Lydia would shun this man as she would a lion for he is an artful rogue”
This letter is not that difficult to decipher: Lydia is describing a serial harasser, a menace to the community. She is also making us privy, so many years later, to a second fact: women DID write to one another, and other family members, about predatory people in the workplace. This is not a whisper network, it’s a peer into a letter chain that has somehow survived.
Notably, another case from around this period ended up in the Lowell Daily Courier. An article from December 20, 1847 relates the testimony of Elvira C. Mitchell against Dr. Ingalls, Farmer in Lowell:
There is more coverage, this time from the Boston Post, December 18, 1847, p.2:
“Dr Ingalls, a short, pale young man, on an indictment alleging that at Lowell, on the 18th of May, upon Elvira C. Mitchell, he violently and feloniously an assault did make…”
This article reminds us that “Miss Mitchell” was a minor: 16 years old. She worked for the Suffolk Corporation. She may have imagined that Lowell would be an adventure–an opportunity to earn money for herself, for others, or for a future.
Remarks I delivered at a commemorative ceremony marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved African people in present-day Virginia:
Four hundred years ago, privateers brought forth, on this continent, the beginnings of what would become a new nation. This nation, conceived in liberty and in slavery, would struggle henceforth with the proposition that all people are indeed created equal. The first enslaved people that arrived from Africa in the English colonies were stolen. They were not the first to be enslaved in the Americas; they were far, far from the last. The story of American slavery is one that precedes 1619 and ripples well into the present, in forms of social injustice, bigotry, and malice.
Today, we are still engaged in a great internal battle, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are not on a battlefield but we are in a war of ideas and conflicting truths. We come together, today, to think of those who forcibly gave their lives and their labor, and who have been robbed of their freedom so that this nation could exist. The stories of the enslaved are often called “hidden,” “unknown,” or “lost.” Who did the hiding, and who did the losing? When did you first learn about enslavement as a historical fact? And when did you first really come to terms with what it would have meant to be bartered, purchased, or sold in the land of the free?
We cannot merely dedicate this day, this ground, this moment. We have to take up the call to make use of the past in the service of truth, in living up to our name as America’s storytellers and our obligation as citizens of this place, this time. Indeed, “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here” we are but one site, one place marking this moment. Still, we ought to remember the “unfinished work” of democracy that led to a bloody war; we should commemorate those who believed that this nation could have “a new birth of freedom, and” a “government of the people, by the people, for the people [.]” That has often been an imperiled, unmet promise. Let us work for a better future, starting by looking clearly at the past.
Allison Horrocks 