Reviews of Books

What happens when a historian positions the periphery at the center, when women and Native Americans, tablecloths and baskets, daily life and daily toil take center stage in an epic account of colonial history? What happens when the power brokers, the armies, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the inventor of the cotton gin find themselves positioned as "background," as small singular trumpet notes heard against the steady thump of a thousand looms and the whirr of ten thousand spinning wheels? Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age of Homespun is a history of textiles in New England from the 1670s to the 1840s, but it is also the history of everything else: gender relations, economic relations, Indian wars, Indian survival, sheep herding, county fairs, rural literacy, sovereignty, inheritance, concepts of virtue, value, and memory. This is a Braudelian narrative: a patchwork of many lives, a "thick description" of disparate unsuspecting objects, and a unified history that draws its reader with a sense of breadth, completion, and truth, a history recounted with the readability of Tolstoy.	1
Structured as a series of chronologically arranged case studies featuring fourteen surviving examples of home production, the narrative is threaded on a progressively unfolding reading of Horace Bushnell's retrospective eulogy "The Age of Homespun" of 1851, in which the distinguished Congregational clergyman marked the close--by naming it--of the era of home textile production in New England. The speech, given on the occasion of the two-day Litchfield County (Connecticut) Centennial Celebration to an audience of more than 5,000 gathered to hear pieties about the town's distinguished generals and divines, authors and members of Congress, inverted expectations by using female cloth-making as the organizing theme and reminding Bushnell's listeners of the labors of his mother and grandmother, of their mothers and grandmothers. But Ulrich's book is not about rhetorical pieties, expected or unexpected; it is about objects.	2
The rationale for Ulrich's use of objects, not only incorporating them into an evidentiary base but positioning them at the heart of her inquiry, is that they call attention to "unseen technologies, interconnections, and contradictions that lie beneath audible [historic] events" (p. 25). The project is not to learn more about a handful of surviving isolated objects but to unfold a "history of textiles [that] is fundamentally a story about international commerce in goods and ideas. . . . a story about exploitation as well as exchange, social disruption as well as entrepreneurship, violence as well as aesthetics" (p. 414). The book treats objects as markers of otherwise invisible emotions and human relations. The result is a double perspective: looking at culture from the inside, from an embedded prospect, and simultaneously from a vantage point that clarifies larger patterns. The strategy depends equally on the painstaking research involved in each case study, on a linking of each micro-narrative to macroscopic issues, and on seemingly effortless but painstakingly crafted prose in which our patient author knits together the ragged facts of almost anonymous rural lives. Ulrich makes it look easy. She also makes it fun, with an irrepressible exuberance bouncing off every page.	. . .