This article suggests that the gap between professional historians and the public has grown during the past twenty-five years and that both the public and the profession have suffered as a result. It suggests further that historians in academic and nonacademic settings need to overcome institutional barriers that prevent them from providing better service to the public. Just as seeing-eye dogs guide sightless people to their destinations, professionally trained historians should be leading the public to a more promising future, thanks to their ability to separate objectively determined historical facts from self-serving, often ideological opinions and fantasies.
For more than four decades, historians, historic preservationists, journalists, and public officials have debated the purpose and appropriateness of a national park in Lowell, Massachusetts. This article, written by the first NPS historian in Lowell, builds on existing literature and interprets the founding and early development of Lowell National Historical Park in the context of changing national politics. It locates the concept for the park in the Great Society, documents the contested debate over the park's founding in the 1970s, and argues that the park developed very differently than planned during the radically changed political environment of the 1980s.
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