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An enlightening look at American women's work in the late eighteenth century. What was women's work truly like in late eighteenth-century America, and what does it tell us about the gendered social relations of labor in the early republic? In Entangled Lives, Marla R. Miller examines the lives of Anglo-, African, and Native American women in one rural New England community—Hadley, Massachusetts—during the town's slow transformation following the Revolutionary War. Peering into the homes, taverns, and farmyards of Hadley, Miller offers readers an intimate history of the working lives of these women and their vital role in the local economy. Miller, a longtime resident of Hadley, follows a...
Rebecca Dickinson's powerful voice, captured through excerpts from the pages of her journal, allows colonial and revolutionary-era New England to come alive. Dickinson's life illustrates the dilemmas faced by many Americans in the decades before, during, and after the American Revolution, as well as the paradoxes presented by an unmarried woman who earned her own living and made her own way in the small town where she was born. Rebecca Dickinson: Independence for a New England Woman, uses Dickinson's world as a lens to introduce readers to the everyday experience of living in the colonial era and the social, cultural, and economic challenges faced in the transformative decades surrounding th...
Among the enduring stereotypes of early American history has been the colonial Goodwife, perpetually spinning, sewing, darning, and quilting, answering all of her family's textile needs. But the Goodwife of popular historical imagination obscures as much as she reveals; the icon appears to explain early American women's labor history, while at the same time allowing it to go unexplained. Tensions of class and gender recede, and the largest artisanal trade open to early American women is obscured in the guise of domesticity. In this book, Marla R. Miller illuminates the significance of women's work in the clothing trades of the early Republic. Drawing on diaries, reminiscences, letters, ledgers, and material culture, she explores the contours of working women's lives in rural New England, offering a nuanced view of their varied ranks and roles - skilled and unskilled, black and white, artisanal and laboring - as producers and consumers, clients and crafts-women, employers and employees
A “first-rate” biography of the seamstress and patriot and a vivid portrait of life in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia: “Authoritative and engrossing” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Finalist, Cundill Prize in History Betsy Ross and the Making of America is the first comprehensively researched and elegantly written biography of one of America’s most captivating figures of the Revolutionary War. Drawing on new sources and bringing a fresh, keen eye to the fabled creation of “the first flag,” Marla R. Miller thoroughly reconstructs the life behind the legend. This authoritative work provides a close look at the famous seamstress while shedding new light on the lives of the ar...
Riding Preservation's New Wave: How to Build on Movements for Memoria
The newest title in our Campus Guide series takes readers on an architectural tour of University of Massachusetts Amherst. As one of the nation's oldest public universities, and the largest in the Northeast, the University has a rich and storied history. Initially chartered as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the school has grown from fifty farmers to close to 24,000 students of diverse backgrounds and academic interests. The University's campus has also expectedly experienced parallel growth. From a few barns on the Berkshire foothills, the University now sits atop nearly 1,500 acres. Five carefully considered tours put the architectural history of the campus into context.
How and why is Christianity's center of gravity shifting to the developing world? To understand this rapidly growing phenomenon, Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori spent four years traveling the globe conducting extensive on-the-ground research in twenty different countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The result is this vividly detailed book which provides the most comprehensive information available on Pentecostalism, the fastest-growing religion in the world. Rich with scenes from everyday life, the book dispel many stereotypes about this religion as they build a wide-ranging, nuanced portrait of a major new social movement.
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Over the past generation, kiteflying has evolved beyond a childhood rite of passage into a mainstream adult activity. The kite's popularity skyrocketed at a time when kite makers adopted modern synthetic materials developed for other industries. A new breed of sport kites appeared and kite artists emerged, dazzling onlookers with three-dimensional aerial sculptures. Inventors perfected new designs and accessories while entrepreneurs created a multimillion-dollar kiting industry. Yet, the kitefliers themselves have remained largely anonymous. Drawing on the World Kite Museum's audio archives, this book brings together firsthand stories from the community of devoted enthusiasts who pull the strings.
The definitive treasury of Massachusetts's historic quilts, and a tribute to the creative spirit of their makers