Ocean State Libraries

A tour de force of history and imagination, The Lady and the Unicorn is Tracy Chevalier’s answer to the mystery behind one of the art world’s great masterpieces—a set of bewitching medieval tapestries that hangs today in the Cluny Museum in Paris. They appear to portray the seduction of a unicorn, but the story behind their making is unknown—until now.

Paris, 1490.  A shrewd French nobleman commissions six lavish

...

Rhode Island's Mill Villages is a fascinating visual history of the development and evolution of over 150 years of life in Simmonsville, Pocasset, Olneyville, and Thornton. Some 200 rare and historic photographs are coupled with detailed and informative captions that immerse the reader in the daily lives and environments of these communities. In the years surrounding the Civil War, European immigrants and textile workers came to Rhode Island to work...

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.

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...

Book 2 of The Bells of Lowell. The mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, beckons Arabella Newberry when she decides to flee the life of the Shakers. There she finds the independence she seeks and a greater purpose as she works for educational reform. But Lowell, plagued by ethnic strife, seems no longer a safe haven but rather a danger when several girls go missing. As rumors and conflict invade the industry of the mill, Arabella struggles with her...

When John Barton's wife dies, he is forced to raise his daughter, Mary, alone, while he grieves the love of his life. Though he is a hard-working man, John struggles to provide for his family. Realizing how unfair his financial situation is, John becomes very resentful towards the unethical distribution of wealth between the social classes. Against John's wishes, when Mary comes of age, she decides to help support their family by working in a dressmaking...

In this classic interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, Gary Gerstle challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years...