The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth - Hardcover

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445943 ISBN 13: 9780679445944

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Synopsis

Complemented by more than 150 illustrations, an incisive portrait of early industrialization in America chronicles the production of cloth and its influence on the cultural, economic, social, and political world of early America. By the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale. 17,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

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 <b>Good Wives</b> (1982) and numerous articles and essays on early American history. She won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 for <b>A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary</b>, 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 <b>A Midwife’s Tale</b>. 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.

From the Inside Flap

s 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 fem

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0679445943
• ISBN 13: 9780679445944
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 501