The Age of Homespun: Family Labor in the Colonial Economy

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is James Duncan Professor of History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Professor Ulrich won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. In this lecture, she examines cloth-making in the colonial era in New England as a household industry, how and why cloth from the eighteenth century was preserved during the colonial revival, and why eighteenth-century women marked the cloth they made with their names and other details of their lives.