The Fleece of Their Flock: Homespun & the American Identity

What Scholars Have Said
Since the 1990s, a handful of historians have turned their focus to the sociopolitical
significance behind clothing from the Revolutionary era:
• In Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (1992) and What
Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America
(2002), Linda Baumgarten showcases garments from the Colonial
Williamsburg collection and explains little-known details about society
and everyday apparel, briefly mentioning the homespun movement. 9
• Michael A. Zakim’s Ready-Made Democracy (2003) recounts the evolution
of menswear in America. It discusses the concept of homespun not
just as a way of domestically producing linen and woolen fabrics, but
also as an embodiment of American self-sufficiency and simplicity and a
rejection of the luxuries and excesses of Great Britain. 10
• The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (2011) by Kate
Haulman explores the “culture wars” of colonial fashions and the struggles
of colonists rooting for independence who strove to distance themselves
from the influence of European styles. 11
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of The Age of Homespun: Objects and
Stories in the Creation of the American Myth (2001), uses description
of colonial household objects through the lens of homespun to describe
the political, economic, and cultural state of early America. 12
• Additionally, scholars like Ray Raphael are shifting how the American
Revolution is approached in general with books like A People’s History
of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for
Independence (2001). It is too often depicted as an intellectual movement
within a group of bewigged Founding Fathers, ending in a victorious
war, when in fact, a cultural revolution had been developing decades
before the momentous Declaration was written and signed. 13
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