Lyddie - Books to Parks

In chapter 2 of Lyddie, a Quaker neighbor buys the family calf and helps Lyddie and Charlie on their way. Historians say Quakers respected outsiders but kept to themselves.

In Lyddie, a girl shelters a man escaping slavery who taught himself to read. What the record says about literacy under slavery, freedom inside bondage, and the Quakers who helped.

In chapter 12 of Lyddie, the mill speeds up and friends leave. Did mill workers really call their work slavery, and did Lowell change what they hoped for? The sources say yes.

A guide to chapter 14 of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie, in which her friend Betsy develops the mill cough, and to the real history of cotton dust and lung disease among Lowell's mill workers.

In chapter 15 of Lyddie, Lyddie learns her mother has been sent to an asylum. Did families really send troubled relatives away, and what were asylums like? The sources say it depended.

In Lyddie's farewell chapter, her friend Brigid lives in the Acre. An 1831 newspaper, an 1898 memoir and a historian show what Lowell's Irish settlement was really like.