Eager to escape life on her family’s farm, Alice Barrow moves to Lowell in 1832 and throws herself into the hard work demanded of “the mill girls.”  In spite of the long hours, she discovers a vibrant new life and a true friend—a saucy, strong-willed girl named Lovey Cornell. But conditions at the factory become increasingly dangerous, and Alice finds the courage to represent the workers and their grievances. Although the mill owner, Hiram...

Impoverished Vermont farm girl Lyddie Worthen is determined to gain her independence by becoming a factory worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1840s.

In these real-life stories, Rick Bragg brilliantly evokes the hardscrabble lives of those who live and die by an American cotton mill. In 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills had come to the edge of all they had ever been. Across the South, padlocks and chains bound the doors of silent mills. It seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Alabama, that their mill still bit, shook, and roared. The mill had become almost...

In the diary account of her journey from Ireland in 1847 and of her work in a mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, fourteen-year-old Mary reveals a great longing for her family.

Set in rural China in 1926, this story tells how a group of exploited silk-workers lead the first strike for better conditions than their village has ever seen. The women combine their courage and strength to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own.

Letters from young girls who left their homes to work in factories and mills examine their economic concerns, the work they were doing, and their friends and social lives.

The Belles of New England is a masterful, definitive, and eloquent look at the enormous cultural and economic impact on America of New England's textile mills. The author, an award-winning CBS producer, traces the history of American textile manufacturing back to the ingenuity of Francis Cabot Lodge. The early mills were an experiment in benevolent enlightened social responsibility on the part of the wealthy owners, who belonged to many of Boston's...

The mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, comes to life with intrigue and drama from the creative writing team of Judith Miller and Tracie Peterson. Young women at the end of the 19th century seek employment from driven men intent on transforming America's textile industry. Daughtersof the Loom features Lilly Armbruster, who is forced to work in the mills as her only means for survival. But Lilly's resentment runs deep against the "lords of the loom"--the...