Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor Emerita at Harvard University, has transformed our understanding of early American women's lives and material culture through groundbreaking scholarship spanning five decades. After earning degrees from the University of Utah (BA, 1960), Simmons College (MA, 1971), and University of New Hampshire (PhD, 1980), she rose from teaching at a small New Hampshire college to become one of America's most influential historians. Her 1990 book "A Midwife's Tale" earned both the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize, while her casual observation that "well-behaved women seldom make history" evolved from a scholarly article into a cultural phenomenon. As James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard (1995-2018), she pioneered innovative approaches to studying ordinary lives through material objects, exemplified in works like "The Age of Homespun" and "Good Wives." Her achievements include a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), membership in the American Philosophical Society (2003), and presidency of both the American Historical Association (2009) and Mormon History Association (2014). Through her scholarship examining diaries, household inventories, textiles, and other material artifacts, she has illuminated the previously hidden lives of early American women while mentoring generations of historians in new methodological approaches.