Abstract IN her 1999 keynote at the Dublin Seminar “Textiles in New England II: Four Centuries of Material Life,” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich articulated the power of textiles as primary sources, as gateways to methods of inquiry, and evidence otherwise discarded, ignored, or lost.1 Today the address reads as a preview of her 2001 watershed book, The Age of Homespun, and as a summary of her pathbreaking work on women's work in early New England.2 Like her fellow participants and organizers, Ulrich both celebrates and interrogates the unique power of textiles. For those of us participating in this work today, not only were Ulrich's words a clarion call for how we wanted to engage with the past, they were also a celebration of those who “care about textiles and want to hear them sing.”3 Through a single tablecloth, bedrug, account book, probate inventory, dress, or spinning wheel we can examine individual lives and connect those in a spiraling, layered web of labor, social, political, economic, gender and regional history. In her expert hands the micro becomes macro without losing its intimacy and relevance.
Laura Johnson (Mon,) studied this question.
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