The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth - Hardcover

Complemented by more than 150 illustrations, an incisive portrait of early industrialization in America chronicles the production of cloth and its influence on the cultural, economic, social, and political world of early America. By the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale. 17,500 first printing.

s that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth--and of history--in early America. Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor―men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then fem