The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (review)

On August 14, 1851, Reverend Mr. Horace Bushnell of Hartford, Connecticut, delivered a resounding speech as part of Litchfield County's centennial celebration. Unlike his esteemed colleagues, who recounted long lists of distinguished civic fathers associated with particular public events, Bushnell sang the praises of the anonymous kings and queens of the "age of homespun"—a time when America's unique republican character was shaped in the crucible of preindustrial, self-sufficient households inhabited by virtuous, thrifty, hard-working, and neighborly men and women.

Taking Bushnell's speech as her point of departure, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich sets out to understand the attraction that the mythos of an age of homespun held for nineteenth-century Americans and how that notion inspired and informed their efforts to record and preserve New England history. With an interest in both cloth making and history making at the heart of her inquiry, the author organizes each of the book's eleven chapters around one or two textiles or textile-related objects.

Drawing on object-centered anthropological models for thinking about the meaning of things, as well as text-based methods honed by historians (including the texts of folktales documented by folklorists), Ulrich artfully teases out the multiple stories that converge in the objects she has chosen to illuminate—stories that the age of homespun mythos (as one of many competing cultural narratives) alternately embodied, misrepresented, and repressed. Attending closely to physical evidence of how items such as an Indian basket, an embroidered rose blanket, and a linen tablecloth were made and used, as well as to a broad array of textual materials—everything from probate inventories to diaries to the idiosyncratic, handwritten note that accompanied the gift of an object to a historical society—this book wonderfully complicates our understanding of the cultural contexts that shaped the production and consumption of textiles and of history in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century New England.

Ulrich concludes that home production of textiles was indeed central to the early nineteenth-century New England economy. But its importance to the rhetoric of the age of homespun had as much or more to do with the fact that "images of industrious, self-sacrificing and patriotic women domesticated and softened the often harsh realities of political conflict, economic uncertainty, and war" (p. 413). Images of republican women spinning and weaving repressed the facts that the cotton they spun was grown by slaves and that the cultivation of linen and of sheep for textile production was significantly implicated in the eradication of indigenous peoples' way of life and ability to sustain themselves economically.

For anyone who has experienced frustration with the scant interpretive labels that often accompany historical textiles in museum exhibitions, The Age of Homespun will become gospel for how to take seriously the textiles and the women and men who made and preserved them. These readers will cheer when Ulrich writes that "the history of textiles is fundamentally a story about international commerce in goods and ideas. It is therefore a story about exploitation as well as exchange, social disruption as well as entrepreneurship, violence as well as aesthetics" (p. 414).

This book disappoints only in its visual presentation of the objects under consideration. Except for the engaging four-color image of an embroidered chimney piece, circa 1747-1750, on the book's jacket, all the illustrations of textiles and textile-related objects that accompany the text are black and white. What a pity for a book that, otherwise, is so respectful of its objects of study.

In all other regards, The Age of Homespun more than accomplishes what it sets out to do. This book models a rigorous and compelling interdisciplinary methodology for the study and interpretation of material culture and challenges all of us whose personal and professional...