In the early 1800s, America was still a nation of fields and workshops — until one city transformed everything. Lowell, Massachusetts, became the birthplace of America’s Industrial Revolution, where red-brick mills, roaring turbines, and a new class of workers reshaped the nation’s economy and identity.

At the heart of this transformation were the “Lowell Mill Girls” — thousands of young women who left rural farms to work twelve-hour days under deafening machines. Promised education and dignity, they instead found exhaustion and exploitation, becoming some of the first Americans to fight for labor rights.