Lyddie

Welcome to Lowell National Historical Park’s landing page for Lyddie. This 1991 novel by Newbery Award-winning author Katherine Paterson highlights the experiences of young women working in textile mills in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts. This website is the third in a National Park Service series called Books to Parks, an initiative that links award-winning children’s fiction to the real geographic and historical settings in which they take place. You can visit other Books to Parks sites at Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963.

The Lyddie Books to Parks site is a collaboration between scholars, museum educators, and the NPS. It uses primary source documents from Lowell National Historical Park and a range of secondary sources to contextualize Lyddie’s struggle for self-determination, as well as the degrees of freedom experienced by the story’s diverse cast of characters.

From this landing page, you will find:

· Chapter Summaries of Lyddie. Short summaries capturing the important points of each chapter. Summaries include Fact Checks that encourage exploration of what in the novel is fact, what is fiction, and what is implied but left unsaid. Answers are linked to primary and secondary sources, connecting the novel to real people, places, things, and events, and enabling visitors to “do history” for themselves.

· Voices from the Field. Short, child-friendly essays by academic experts. The Voices from the Field section includes informational narratives on themes present in Lyddie, including education, ambition, capitalism, labor organization, and enslavement. The goal: bridging the gap between the academy and grade schools by making scholarship in labor history, feminist and women’s studies, and children’s literature accessible to K-12 students.

For information on field trips that will make Lyddie come alive for your students, explore the Tsongas Industrial History Center Field Trip page. The Tsongas Industrial History Center (a partnership of Lowell National Historical Park and the University of Massachusetts Lowell) offers a variety of educational field trip programs and other online resources that connect well with Lyddie. For more information, visit the Tsongas Industrial History Center.

We welcome feedback on the site! Please contact us if you have ideas or suggestions.