Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. Between 1785 and 1812, a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in twenty-seven years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel...

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden-and not always stoic-face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In this book 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...

Using objects 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,

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