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SUMMARY:Author Book Talk: Dr. Marla R. Miller\, Entangled Lives: Labor\, Livelihood\, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts
DESCRIPTION:Free\, virtual program; registration required \nAbout the Author: Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst\, Dr. Marla Miller’s primary research interest is U.S. women’s work before industrialization. Her book The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in August 2006\, and won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. In 2009 she published an edited collection\, Cultivating a Past: Essays in the History of Hadley\, Massachusetts\, also with the University of Massachusetts Press. Her book Betsy Ross and the Making of America  (Holt\, 2010)–a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman–was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History at McGill University (the world’s largest non-fiction historical literature prize)\, and was named to the Washington Post’s “Best of 2010” list. A short biography of Massachusetts gownmaker Rebecca Dickinson appeared in the Westview Press series Lives of American Women in summer 2013. In 2019 she completed a microhistory of women and work in 18th-century New England titled Entangled Lives: Labor\, Livelihood\, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Johns Hopkins University Press\, 2019). In addition to her own scholarship\, Professor Miller contributes to her fields of study as an editor.  She has served on the editorial board of the Public Historian as well as the Journal of the Early Republic\, and currently serves on the board of the New England Quarterly.   Dr. Miller is also the founding editor of the prizewinning UMass Press series Public History in Historical Perspective. \nAbout the Book: What was women’s work truly like in late eighteenth-century America\, and what does it tell us about the gendered social relations of labor in the early republic? In Entangled Lives\, Marla R. Miller examines the lives of Anglo-\, African\, and Native American women in one rural New England community—Hadley\, Massachusetts—during the town’s slow transformation following the Revolutionary War. Peering into the homes\, taverns\, and farmyards of Hadley\, Miller offers readers an intimate history of the working lives of these women and their vital role in the local economy. Miller\, a longtime resident of Hadley\, follows a handful of eighteenth-century women working in a variety of occupations: domestic service\, cloth making\, health and healing\, and hospitality. She asks about the social openings and opportunities this work created—and the limitations it placed on ordinary lives. Her compelling stories about women’s everyday work\, grounded in the material culture\, built environment\, and landscapes of rural western Massachusetts\, reveal the larger economic networks in which Hadley operated and the subtle shifts that accompanied the emergence of the middle class in that rural community. Ultimately\, this book shows how work differentiated not only men and woman but also race and class as Miller follows young\, mostly white women working in domestic service\, African American women negotiating labor in enslavement and freedom\, and women of the rural gentry acting as both producers and employers. Engagingly written and featuring fascinating characters\, the book deftly takes us inside a society and shows us how it functions. Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history\, microhistory\, and historical scholarship\, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.
URL:https://massachusetts250.org/event/author-book-talk-dr-marla-r-miller-entangled-lives-labor-livelihood-and-landscapes-of-change-in-rural-massachusetts/
LOCATION:Virtual Program\, North Washington Square 19 1/2\, Salem\, MA\, 01970\, United States
CATEGORIES:Event,Speakers,Women's History
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