Authors Professor Bob Forrant of UMass Lowell  and Susan Grabski of the Lawrence History Center) will discuss their book – “Lawrence and the 1912 Bread & Roses Strike”  on Monday morning, September 30, 2013 from10:30am – 12:00pm at the Tewksbury Public Library. There will be a book selling and signing afterwards for those interested. These author events have a limited seating of 50.  Learn more here on the “Calendar of Events”: http://www.eventkeeper.com/code/events.cfm?curOrg=TEWKS#3255275

“The presentation will be based on the brand new book — Lawrence and the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike — by Robert Forrant and Susan Grabski, from Arcadia Publishing.  Incorporated in 1847 on the banks of the Merrimack River, Lawrence was the final and most ambitious of New England’s planned textile-manufacturing cities developed by the Boston-area entrepreneurs who helped launch the American Industrial Revolution. With a dam and canal system to generate power, Lawrence led the world in the production of worsted wool cloth by 1912. The Pacific Cotton Mills alone had sales of nearly $10 million and had mechanical equipment capable of producing 800 miles of finished textile fabrics every working day. However, industrial growth was accompanied by worsening health, housing, and working conditions for most of the city’s workers. These were the root causes that led to the long, sometimes violent struggle between people of diverse ethnic groups and languages and the city’s mill owners and overseers. The 1912 strike — known today as the Bread and Roses Strike — became a landmark moment in history.”