From The Guardian: "The forgotten voices of Lancashire’s poverty-stricken cotton workers during the US civil war have been heard for the first time in 150 years, after researchers at the University of Exeter unearthed a treasure trove of poetry. "Up to 400,000 of the county’s cotton workers were left unemployed when the war stopped cotton from reaching England’s north-west in the 1860s and the mills were closed. Without work, they struggled to put food on the table, and experts from the University of Exeter have discovered that many of them turned to poetry to describe the impact of the cotton famine. "Written between 1861 and 1865, many of the poems are by the workers most affected by the famine. Around a quarter of the 300 poems discovered so far are written in the Lancashire dialect, with some published in local newspapers or simply sent in letters. All the poems were held in local archives and had never been studied or collected...." "Rennie and his team have created a publicly accessible database [<http://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/>] of the poems, along with 100 recordings of them being read. 'We are trying simply to show they can be heard as well as read,' said Rennie’s colleague Ruth Mather. 'The Lancashire dialect pieces in particular are fiendishly difficult to recite, and we are aware that pronunciation of many terms may be contentious. But we hope we are bringing alive an important part of Lancashire cultural history that has lain relatively dormant for more than 150 years.'” For the full story, see <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/09/mill-workers-poems-about-1860s-cotton-famine-rediscovered> or <https://tinyurl.com/ycejmwhn> Lynne