Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

ACCLAIM FOR LAUREL THATCHER ULRICHS

The Age of Homespun

Finalist for the Francis Parkman Prize
of the Society of American Historians

Fascinating.A broadening of conventional historical boundaries.

The Boston Globe

In a unique work of astonishing originality, Laurel Ulrich has achieved two distinct goals: re-creating the textiles that early Americans made and used, but also the illusions that nineteenth-century Americans imagined about their forebears domestic milieu. She does all of that with due attention to particularity of place and change over timeproviding a superb example of the gifted historians craft.

Michael Kammen,
author of American Culture, American Tastes

A yarn of a story? A richly woven text? A tapestry of tales? Readers of The Age of Homespun will have to reach deep into their baskets of metaphors to find words to describe this stunning work of scholarship and storytelling, in which Ulrich asks us to think hard about the spinning of wooland the writing of history.

Jill Lepore, author of The Name of War:
King Philips War and the Origins of American Identity

With her usual magic, Laurel Ulrich finds the world in small pieces of evidence. Slavery, Indians, international commerce, class, revolution, gentilityall are woven into the fabrics she describes. Moreover, she finds these weavers, spinners, and embroiderers creating a culture of homespun later to be memorialized in the formation of American identity.

Richard L. Bushman, author of The Refinement of America

A rich blend of history and material culture and of history and memory that reflects the storytelling and analytic skills of one of todays finest historians.

Thomas Dublin,
author of Transforming Womens Work:
New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution

A deeply intelligent, richly detailed study that enriches fundamentally our understandings of early American history and American historical memory.

Neal Salisbury,
author of Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans,
and the Making of New England, 15001643

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The Age of Homespun

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Formerly a professor of American history at the University of New Hampshire, she is the author of Good Wives (1982) and numerous articles and essays on early American history. She won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 for A Midwifes Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Born and raised in the Rocky Mountain West, she has lived in New England since 1960. During her tenure as a MacArthur Fellow, she assisted in the production of a PBS documentary based on A Midwifes Tale. Her work is also featured on an award-winning Web site called dohistory.org. She and her husband, Gael Ulrich, are the parents of five grown children.

ALSO BY LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH

Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives
of Women in Northern New England,
16501750

A Midwifes Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard,
Based on Her Diary, 17851812

All Gods Critters Got a Place in the Choir
(with Emma Lou Thayne)

For all the textilians

You must not go into the burial places, and look about only for the tall monuments and the titled names. It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village notables called Esquires, that mark the springs of our successes and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these.

Horace Bushnell, The Age of Homespun, 1851

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones And fenced their gardens with the Redmans bones.

Robert Lowell, Children of Light, 1944

What did they do, our grandmothers, as they sat spinning all the day? Are we not ourselves the web they wove?

Anonymous toast, Mary Floyd Talmage Chapter
Daughters of the American Revolution
Litchfield, Connecticut, 1910