Updates
Occasional notes on new essays, talks, and projects.
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Telling American Stories
Anyone who has heard me give my usual talk about Betsy Ross knows that one of the first slides I like to use is of my Colonial Barbie—spotted in the aisles of Toys-R-Us in the mid 1990s, while I was still writing my dissertation on women’s work in the eighteenth-century clothing trades. I was writing…
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Third Fig!
A highlight of this year was a month (April–poetry month!) in the deliciously delightful quarters of the Millay House Rockland. With a month of solitude in the home in which the poet was born, I was able to sift and sort through the material I had assembled so far, and to really think about where…
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Biography for Better Living
One of the things that first drew me to this project, and really excites me about it, is to see these two women, Normena MacKinnon and Gertrude Tiemer, actively studying other female couples in the arts to see how they built lives together. Both women were trying to learn more about Amy Lowell, for reasons…
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A New Direction
Once I hit my 50s I started thinking a lot about throughlines — interests and intellectual commitments that have circled back around after years, and even decades. My 16-year-old self would be stunned to learn that my 59-year-old self is grateful to Connie Krueger, an English teacher in my Wisconsin high school. I remember nothing…
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Betsy’s Semiquincentennial
Now that we’ve reached the U.S. 250th, it’s going to be a year of Betsy Ross! This 2010 book and subsequent museum exhibition were both such joys…. And now this year, with the Semiquincentennial creating more interest in the American Revolution, I’m so pleased to have been invited to give many talks about Betsy Ross…
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