Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001), she has incorporated museum-based research as well as more traditional archival work. Her most recent book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women's history, and material culture. Professor Ulrich's work is featured on the web at www.dohistory.org and www.randomhouse.com.

Professor Ulrich is serving, and/or has served, on the following American Civilization dissertation committee(s):

“Found at Sea: Mapping Ships’ Locations on the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic” (John Dixon)

“Argument Written in a Country Graveyard: Politics and New England Mortuary Culture, 1600-1830” (Caitlin Hopkins)

"Skeletons in the American Attic: Curiosity, Science and the Appropriation of the American Indian Past" (Judy Kertesz)

"Object Lessons in American Culture" (Sarah Carter)

“‘The Remainder of our Effects We Must Leave Behind’: American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things, 1765-1800” (Katherine Rieder)

“The Inward Fire: A History of Cruelty in Marriage in the Northeastern United States, 1800-1860” (Eliza Clark)

“The Pirate Nest; The Impact of Piracy on Newport, Rhode Island and Charles Town, South Carolina, 1670-1730” (Mark G. Hanna)

“Wayward Wives, Runaway Slaves and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in Early America” (Kirsten Sword)

Contact information: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, History Department