DigitalWorcester

This site explores politics, business, religion, demography, and culture in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the 19th and 20th centuries through documents, primary sources, photographs and images, maps, oral histories and other resources. The resources posted here are fully text-searchable. Our goals are to provide undergraduate history students at Worcester State College an opportunity to develop a collaborative digital public history resource for the broader community, use local history as a path to explore America's past, and to document one city's past in new and innovative ways.

Worcester is a small, vibrant American city located in central Massachusetts. It is the county seat of Worcester County, MA and is New England's second largest city. The city has a rich history which offers a window onto cultural change in the United States. The Free Soil party began in Worcester, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment in the antebellum period. The city hosted the first women's suffrage convention in 1850. Although the city lacked natural waterpower, it nonetheless became an important rail transportation hub and industrial center, manufacturing products as diverse as wire, furniture, steam engines, and skates. Factory laborers came first from Ireland, and later from French-speaking Canada, Sweden, Scandinavia, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Armenia, and Greece.