Harvard Historian Discusses Hidden Story of Colonial Needlepoint in Lawrence University Address

APPLETON, WIS. — A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explores the stories behind a well-known 18th-century Puritan embroidery in a Lawrence University Phi Beta Kappa lecture.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, presents “The First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality: A Textile Mystery,” Thursday, May 1 at 7 p.m. in Youngchild Hall 121. Ulrich also will conduct a question-and-answer session Friday, May 2 at 10 a.m. in Main Hall Strange Commons. Both events are free and open to the public.

A specialist in early American social history, women’s history and material culture, Ulrich will discuss a needlework stitched in 1783 by Prudence Punderson of Connecticut before her marriage that depicts three scenes of mortality: infancy, womanhood and death. Ulrich will challenge the conventional thinking that Punderson’s work merely reflected typical New England Puritan obsession with death, arguing the work is “a dynamic portrayal of political and personal conflict in an age of revolution.”

Ulrich, whose research focuses on the hidden lives of ordinary women who have enjoyed extraordinary lives, is the author of four books, including “Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750” and “A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard,” which earned her the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history and became the basis of a PBS documentary. Her most recent work, “Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History,” was published in 2007.