The Age of Homespun

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307416860
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history. In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.

The Age of Homespun

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0679766448
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

The Golden Age of Homespun

Author: Jared Van Wagenen, Jr.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
"You have seen neglected oxbows, but what do you know of their making or of the training of a yoke of oxen?... What do you know of the rambling shoemakers who came to a farmhouse and stayed until each member of the family was newly shod with leather from the farm's cattle? Have you ever wondered about the processes by which our frontiersmen translated forest land into fields of wheat? What do you know about those two first crops of the pioneers, ashes and maple sugar? What do you know of log houses, of shingle making, bridges, and flax growing, of spinning and weaving cloth for a garment that was homegrown and homemade? Here is folk history, the accumulated memory of old men and women whom the author knew,... memories he has substantiated by a lifetime of research."—from the Foreword by Louis C. Jones The Golden Age of Homespun chronicles the occupations, handicrafts, and traditions that defined rural life in upstate New York—and throughout much of America—in the first half of the nineteenth century. First published in 1953, it is an engaging and affectionate account of how land was cleared, farms established, and homes built; of how each family fed, clothed, and warmed itself; and of the trades, crafts, and industries that augmented a primarily agrarian economy. Illustrated with 45 delightful line drawings that depict the activities and implements described by Jared van Wagenen, Jr., The Golden Age of Homespun is an invaluable record of how upstate New York farmers lived on and off the land in the decades before the Civil War—a vanished way of life that still holds strong appeal in the American imagination.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307472779
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.

The Age of Homespun

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Book Description
Using objects that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth--and of history--in early America. Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor--men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning. Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun, --Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.

Magnificent Homespun Brown: A Celebration

Author: Samara Cole Doyon
Publisher: Tilbury House Publishers and Cadent Publishing
ISBN: 0884487997
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Book Description
Coretta Scott King 2021 Honoree A winner of the ILA 2021 Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Awards in the fiction category. NCSS 2021 Notable Social Studies Book Maine Lupine Award Winner A CBC Recommended Book • A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year A New York Public Library Best Picture Book of 2020 Kirkus Starred Review PW Starred Review School Library Journal Starred Review Told by a succession of exuberant young narrators, Magnificent Homespun Brown is a story -- a song, a poem, a celebration -- about feeling at home in one’s own beloved skin. With vivid illustrations by Kaylani Juanita, Samara Cole Doyon sings a carol for the plenitude that surrounds us and the self each of us is meant to inhabit.

A House Full of Females

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101947977
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 525

Book Description
From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.

Homespun Sarah

Author: Verla Kay
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Book Description
Simple rhyming text presents the everyday life of a young girl, living on a Pennsylvania farm in the early eighteenth century, who is quickly outgrowing all of her dresses.

Tangible Things

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199382298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past. The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage--from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles--in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history. Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard's remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people's houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip "Dagwood and Blondie." A companion website catalogs the more than two hundred objects in the original exhibition and suggests ways in which the principles outlined in the book might change the way people understand the tangible things that surround them.

Good Wives

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden--and not always stoic--face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens--and the considerable power--of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising--and, all too often, mourning--her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best.