Ulrich to discus how diaries, quilts give insight into mid-1800s Maine
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard history professor, will deliver the lecture, “Patty’s Sampler and Phebe’s Quilt: Traces of Maine in the American West” at 12:45 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, at the Collins Center for the Arts.
Ulrich demonstrates how the diaries, letters and needlework of Patty Sessions and Phebe Woodruff suggest new frameworks for understanding the material culture of Maine from 1835 to 1870. Sessions was born in 1795 in Newry, Maine and Woodruff in 1807 in Scarborough. Both migrated in the 1830s to the West and led Mormon women.
Ulrich’s keynote address for the annual conference of the Association of Maine Archives and Museums is, in part, funded by the Maine Humanities Council as part of the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative. It is free and open to the public. For more information or to request a disability accommodation, call 581.1226.