LOWELL — The city of Lowell often celebrates the women and immigrants that helped shape the city as it developed into an industrial powerhouse in the 19th century, and for nearly 50 years the Lowell National Historical Park has served as a steward of that era of the city’s history.
After an executive order from President Donald Trump last year, some are concerned that history is being erased.
On Monday, state Rep. Tara Hong sent a letter to members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation calling attention to the removal of a short film from the Lowell National Historical Park theater.
Hong wrote the letter in response to a March 6 opinion column in The Boston Globe, which criticized the removal of two films once viewable at one of the National Park site’s theaters. One of the films, titled “Lowell: the Continuing Revolution” is still viewable online, including on the YouTube page of U.S. Sen. Ed Markey.
“I share these concerns and believe strongly that we must not allow our history to be erased,” said Hong’s letter.
The film describes Lowell’s founding, the development of the canals that would power the city’s mills, “The Mill Girls” who would provide much of the early labor for the textile mills and their fight for labor rights. It also discusses the wave of immigrants who would come to make up the mill labor force later on, the difficult and unsafe working conditions mill employees faced, and the city’s economic decline after superior technologies for powering mills, like the steam engine, were adopted elsewhere.
“The story of Lowell’s mill workers, including the difficult conditions they faced and their fight for fair wages and safer workplaces, is an essential part of our city’s identity and our nation’s labor history,” said Hong’s letter. “Organizations such as the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association played a key role in advocating for improved working conditions and helping to shape the labor protections many workers benefit from today.”
Preserving the city’s history is even more meaningful this year, Hong said in his letter, with it being the 200th anniversary of Lowell’s founding, as well as the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“Lowell is one of the most historic and unique cities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Our community is rich in diversity and shaped by generations of people whose stories deserve to be told — from the earliest mill workers to the vibrant immigrant communities that continue to shape Lowell today,” said Hong. “I urge you to help protect and preserve this important part of our city’s history. No history should be erased or sanitized because of political viewpoints. The stories of working people and the struggles that shaped our nation must remain accessible for everyone to learn from.”
Hong’s letter comes as the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent nonprofit advocacy group for U.S. National Parks, filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior “to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to erase history and censor science in America’s national parks.”
The lawsuit surrounds the DOI’s implementation of President Donald Trump’s March 27, 2025 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The text of the order claims there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.”
“This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” says the order. “Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
In the Feb. 17 announcement of the lawsuit from the NPCA, the nonprofit claims “park rangers were told to discard valuable signs and educational materials created after years of historical scholarship and scientific research, because the administration deemed those materials ‘disparaging,’ or not focusing enough on the ‘beauty and grandeur,’ of parks.”
At the Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center and the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, signs have been visible from the DOI, instructing visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
Information and materials have been reportedly removed from other National Park sites across the country, the NPCA said, including at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where information pertaining to President George Washington’s slaves was removed. Information on the effects of climate change has reportedly been removed from Acadia National Park in Maine and Fort Sumter in South Carolina, among other examples of removed materials given by the NPCA.
Robert Forrant, a history professor emeritus at UMass Lowell, said in an email to The Sun Tuesday that what is happening “appears unprecedented.”
“Right after the Second World War, at the height of the Cold War, there were some efforts, especially on college campuses, to dismiss faculty deemed ’too radical’, sympathetic to the Soviet Union, soft on communism,” said Forrant. “This led to a discussion about books being banned from classrooms. Often, the kind of history being purged in 2026 was not part of the curriculum all that much in the 1950s through the mid-1970s.”
Forrant described “a broad-based movement on campuses to include labor, women, and civil rights histories in the university curriculum.”
“This won widespread acceptance until it was recast over the last decade as somehow derogatory toward the nation’s history,” said Forrant.
The National Park Service did not respond to an email from The Sun requesting comment Tuesday.
Original article
Comments