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...

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.

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...

Jake and Rosa, two children, form an unlikely friendship as they try to survive and understand the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

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...

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.

Discusses the history of the first mill in the United States to use machines to turn raw cotton into finished cloth, the women who worked in the mill, and how the innovations in the textile industry brought on the Industrial Revolution.

Told in language at once spare and lyrical, Unravelling is the story of Aimee Slater, who has always longed for a life beyond the small New Hampshire farm her family owns. When, against her mother's wishes, she goes off at the age of 15 to work in the City of Spindles - the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts - she opens a rift between herself and her mother that feels, in her own words, like "an impossible distance." How Aimee ultimately creates...