VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
THE AGE OF HOMESPUN
Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth
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.
History/978-0-679-76644-5
GOOD WIVES
Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in
Northern New England, 1650–1750
A gravestone in northern New England proclaims that a woman was “Eminent for Holiness … Prudence, Sincerity … Meakness … Weanedness From ye World … Publick-Spiritedness … Faithfulness & Charity.” This enthralling work of scholarship strips away those abstractions to reveal the hidden—and not always stoic—faces 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 frontier heroine or notoriety as a murderess.
American History/Women’s Studies/978-0-679-73257-0
WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY
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.
Biography/Women’s Studies/978-1-4000-7527-0
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com