Who is laurel thatcher ulrich

Tarried there this night. She published The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth Knopf, , examining early American history through 14 domestic objects: not just fabric, but tools such as baskets and spinning wheels, and furniture, including an ornate cupboard for displaying textiles. When women handed down household goods to their daughters, there was no legal record. It was brought from Mexico to Harvard by 19th-century botanists who were investigating agricultural products.

So the tortilla, for example—as I explored that, I had to think about anthropology, botany, the economics of agricultural materials, and food, and ethnicity, and race. All of those things played a part in the story of this very odd survival. A member of the Mormon community herself, she examines female activism—women secured the vote in Utah half a century before the passage of the 19th Amendment—and the marriage system, using artifacts such as diaries, ledgers, meeting notes, and quilts.

But history is made in many ways. It could mean collecting documents. It could mean preserving tortillas. Tags: Arts and Sciences , events , Humanities Center. Please consider downloading the latest version of Internet Explorer to experience this site as intended. November 8, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. She delves so deeply into such patterns that she develops insights that elude less patient and less gifted people which is to say, most of us.

This method informed her first book, Good Wives , which examined the roles filled by women in colonial New England. Biblical archetypes framed each section. In the chapters on Jael, for instance, Laurel considered women who transgressed for a larger purpose, and how their actions—even killing Indians in the dead of the night—could be sanctified depending on the circumstance.

Laurel has direct experience of both; that Seventeen story was one relatively benign example of the power of pastoral ideology to smooth and erase the texture of rural life. Her prizewinning William and Mary Quarterly article on the gender division of labor in New England was drawn from this research. She needed to know whether she was looking at homemade or machine-made material, and she also needed to gauge the level of skill shown in the textiles themselves.

For instance, she discovered that New England women embroidered their own rose blankets, copying but also elaborating on English motifs. This episode encapsulates not just her ability to find the importance of what others have dismissed, but also to engage her readers and listeners in doing so.

She makes people care about warp and weft, about wheels and looms, because she shows what is meaningful about these objects, and she writes so beautifully that one cannot help but be drawn into her prose. Grew cold at Evening. Snowd some. I have been at home. In typically modest fashion, Laurel notes that she found this diary by accident; she had driven from Durham to Augusta, Maine, on another research task and figured she might as well have a look at the diary when she had finished her other research early.

Serendipitous yes, but hardly accidental: Laurel saw in this voluminous but not especially inspiring cloth-bound diary a promising resource that other historians had failed to appreciate fully.

She began to work with the diary in the early s, and when she received a National Endowment for the Humanities NEH Summer Grant for , Gael took over care of the children and the house so that she could focus on it full time. It was nevertheless a difficult balancing act.

Laurel showed us that viewing the world through the writings of one woman in a remote corner of the globe could spur fundamental reassessment of long-established narratives. Two decades after its publication, it still challenges readers to question beliefs about things they assumed to be timeless.

It inspired a number of us in the rising generation to become historians. It has even inspired some of our students to become midwives. The book also inspired other creative minds. Its many accolades helped secure NEH funding for filmmaker Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, who made it into a documentary and then, in turn, into dohistory. The web site takes the participatory narratives of the book and film a step further. Indeed, Laurel is the only historian we know whose scholarship is responsible for a bumper sticker and T-shirts, greeting cards, magnets, and mugs.

Frequently misquoted and not necessarily given full attribution or certainly permission for use by its original author , as a slogan her words have taken on a life of their own: sometimes admirable, sometimes a little alarming.

Laurel has herself in many respects been a well-behaved woman: housewife and mother, active member of the LDS church, and generous teacher. Laurel has consistently proven that you can indeed re-write history, and she has been a leader in doing so. The impetus for this effort was not simply to recover achievements that had been slighted and forgotten, but also to recognize the ways an imagined, womanless past can impinge on our present sense of possibility. If there were no senior women in the portraits on the wall at Harvard, there were not too many more in the classrooms.

We recall only two other women out of thirty or so tenured members in the history department when Laurel arrived in It was not an easy task. However, the history department at Harvard University now looks and feels quite different than it did in Laurel deserves much of the credit for this transformation. We have watched administrators and seminar speakers alike presume that a deceptively simple question means that they have little to fear.

Laurel can be a fierce critic in the nicest of ways, and her questions to speakers will often be the sharpest they receive. Her students know full well that a powerful intellect and an impatience with foolishness mean she demands the best of others, as she does of herself. We have been the beneficiaries of her gift for approaching issues from oblique angles, in ways that others would not even consider.

We were all stumped. Oh, we came up with some good and some terrible guesses, but, loath as Harvard students are to admit ignorance and defeat, no one could name the curious wooden object. Laurel revealed that it was a niddy-noddy, used for winding skeins of hand-spun yarn. She was at that time working on The Age of Homespun , and she used it to make a point about those material objects that most historians ignore, and how their use as historical sources might force a re-thinking of conventional narratives.

It was an extraordinarily memorable teaching moment, one of many we can recall, in both her graduate and undergraduate classes. In her teaching as in her scholarship, Laurel pulls apart the creative process, making it accessible and engaging to many audiences at once.

She invites her readers and students to participate in the process of discovery and interpretation. Insofar as it is possible, she trains her students in her particular art of being simultaneously simple and complex. By reaching deep into scholarship in her teaching, she teaches in a way that encourages students to become scholars themselves. Laurel never shies away from putting together ambitious, original courses, whether large core lecture courses or smaller seminars. She makes even large survey courses into chances for dialogue, participation, and discovery.

She allowed multiple versions of the introduction to one of her articles, and the painstaking comments of its editor, to be used in a reading packet, in order to help history majors learn how to revise their own essays. She invites collaboration from her graduate students, so that we have been honored to see obscure primary sources we found in archives brought into large survey classes. Projects that start in her courses often carry over into exhibits and resources available to the wider public.

In her first year on the Harvard faculty, Laurel began an early American writing group. From its inception, Laurel organized this group as a meeting of equals discussing their writing: Laurel and other senior faculty present their work and receive the same scrutiny as that given to the first fledgling dissertation proposals of third-year graduate students. We have grown as writers and historians thanks to this group we may also have grown in waistlines, as there were often pizzas and cookies to share, too.

The group has itself become much larger in recent years, as the number of early Americanists on the faculty has also expanded considerably. Still, that spirit of support and equality has remained. In the first bleary weeks after the birth of our first children, we each received a treasured package: a baby quilt Laurel had made. She is tender yet sharp, endlessly enthusiastic about our research and abilities even when especially when we are not, and always incisive in her comments.

Even after leaving her office after having had a chapter politely ripped to shreds, we would feel uplifted and inspired. We did not always understand her points until months later because she has an uncanny ability to see where research is going much sooner than one actually does oneself.