Until recently, the popular perception of genealogy applied almost exclusively to tracing the family histories of the wealthy and the powerful. Today, it more realistically recounts the struggles of Americans of all stations, all ethnicities, and all races.

The Lowells of Massachusetts were a remarkable family. They were settlers in the New World in the 1600s, revolutionaries creating a new nation in the 1700s, merchants and manufacturers building prosperity in the 1800s, and scientists and artists flourishing in the 1900s. For the first time, Nina Sankovitch tells the story of this fascinating and powerful dynasty in The Lowells of Massachusetts. Though not without scoundrels and certainly no strangers to controversy , the family boasted some of the most astonishing individuals in America’s history: Percival Lowle, the patriarch who arrived in America in the seventeenth to plant the roots of the family tree; Reverend John Lowell, the preacher; Judge John Lowell, a member of the Continental Congress; Francis Cabot Lowell, manufacturer and, some say, founder of the Industrial Revolution in the US; James Russell Lowell, American Romantic poet; Lawrence Lowell, one of Harvard’s longest-serving and most controversial presidents; and Amy Lowell, the twentieth century poet who lived openly in a Boston Marriage with the actress Ada Dwyer Russell. The Lowells realized the promise of America as the land of opportunity by uniting Puritan values of hard work, community service, and individual responsibility with a deep-seated optimism that became a well-known family trait. Long before the Kennedys put their stamp on Massachusetts, the Lowells claimed the bedrock.

This book maps the development of a regional elite and its persistence as an economic upper class through the nineteenth century. Farrell’s study traces the kinship networks and overlapping business ties of the most economically prominent Brahmin families from the beginning of industrialization in the 1820s to the early twentieth century. Archival sources such as genealogies, family papers, and business records are used to address two issues of concern to those who study social stratification and the structure of power in industrializing societies: in what ways have traditional forms of social organization, such as kinship, been responsive to the social and economic changes brought by industrialization; and how active a role did an early economic elite play in shaping the direction of social change and in preserving its own group power and privilege over time.