I am a historian whose work has principally examined the lives of women in early American, bringing biographical approaches and material culture methods to women’s social and cultural history.
My first book, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution examined gender and artisanry in early New England. In 2009 I published an edited collection, Cultivating a Past: Essays in the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, followed in 2010 by Ross and the Making of America — a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman. A short biography of Massachusetts gownmaker Rebecca Dickinson appeared in summer 2013. In 2016, Max Page and I brought out the edited collection Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation. In 2019 I completed a microhistory of women and work in 18th-century New England titled Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. In 2025, her research and writing received the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award–the first author to be recognized by that body for literary achievement in nonfiction.
My new research and writing heads in new directions, though like much of previous work, the project brings a biographical lens to the study of women’s lives in the past. Comradeship of Beauty contemplates women creatives in 1930s New England through the lived experiences of poet and performer Normena MacKinnon and her partner, poet and artist Gertrude Tiemer.
Books
Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States (UMass Press, with Max Page, 2016).
Rebecca Dickinson (Lives of American Women, Westview Press,/Perseus, 2013).
University of Massachusetts Amherst: A Campus Guide (Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), with Max Page.
Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Henry Holt, 2010).
The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (UMass Press, 2006).
Edited Collections
Indigenous Histories in New England: Pastkeepers and Pastkeeping, Proceedings of the 2023 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Dublin Seminar, 2025), with Alice Nash (forthcoming).
Living with Disability in New England, Proceedings of the 2021 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Dublin Seminar, 2024), with Nicole Belolan.
Cultivating A Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts (UMass Press, 2009).
Other Writings (selected articles)
“Telling American Stories: Mattel and the Material Culture of the U.S. Past,” under consideration at the Canadian Review of American Studies.
“Enquilted: Locating Enslaved Labor in Early American Needlework,” invited essay, Lynne Bassett, ed., Something in the Water: New London County Quilts & Bed Covers, 1750‒1825. Florence Griswold Museum, Old Saybrook, CT (completed; awaiting publication)
“Monuments in Flax and Wool: The Memory Work of Heritage Textiles” Winterthur Portfolio Vol 58 No 1 (Spring 2024), 41-72.
“Joining Reinterpretation to Reparation” Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse Vol 15 (2021), 72-82, with Karen Sanchez-Eppler.
“In the Spaciousness of Uncertainty is Room to Act”: Public History’s Long Game” (NCPH Presidential Address) The Public Historian Vol 42, No 3 (August 2020), 264-292.
“Embedding: Putting Hadassah Chapin Ely’s Wholecloth Quilt in Context,” Uncoverings Vol 39 (2018), 168-203.
“The Birth of the Whaling Artifacts Trade in New Bedford,” in Peter Benes, ed. New England at Sea, Proceedings of the 2016 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (2018), with Laura A. Miller.
“‘Artifact Stories:’ Making Memories Matter for Amherst Seniors,” in Hamish Robertson, eds. The Caring Museum: How Older People Contribute to Museums (Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc, 2015), with Elizabeth Sharpe.
“Mehitable Primus and Addie Brown: Women of Color and Hartford’s Nineteenth-Century Dressmaking Trades,” in Peter Benes, ed., Clothing New England, Proceedings of the 2010 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Deerfield: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2014).
“Reconstructing the Absent Center: Looking for Betsy Ross,” Common-Place Vol. 12: Is. 3 (April 2012).
“Gender, Artisanry and Craft Tradition in Early New England: The View Through the Eye of a Needle,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 2003): 743-776.
“Dressmaking as a Trade for Women in Eighteenth-Century Rural New England, Dress Vol 30 (2003), 15-25.
‘My Part Alone:’ The World of Rebecca Dickinson,” New England Quarterly (September, 1998), 1-38.
“Common Parlors: Women and the Recreation of Community Identity in Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1870-1920,” Gender and History (November 1994), 435-455, with Anne Digan Lanning.
Throughlines 