Excerpt from Interdisciplinary Investigations of the Boott Mills, Lowell, Massachusetts, Vol. 3: The Boarding House System as a Way of LifeIn this, the third and final volume of reports on the investigations of the Boott Cotton Mills operation in Lowell, the focal point of our efforts is once again the mill operatives and the boardinghouses in which they lived. With the boardinghouses now gone and the examination of interior space limited to documentary research, we have endeavored to probe the proxernics of the worker's daily lives by turning our attention to the rear yards. These small but intensively used areas served the needs of mill workers and boardinghouse keepers alike. Here was a truly urban space where work and leisure activities merged to create a material record that is a select yet fitting legacy for a laboring people. Much like the prankster's jar of peanuts that explodes in the hands of the unsuspecting dupe, the boardinghouse yards have contained innumerable surprises. By employing excavation techniques geared for maximum horizontal coverage and an array of interdisciplinary analytical techniques, we hope that few of the surprises have eluded us.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.