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Faced with the paucity of surviving texts by mid-eighteenth-century American women, historians interested in women's experience have proven resourceful at using nontextual sources. Recently, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has turned to objects hand-sewn by New England women, maintaining that objects such as sheets, pillowcases, and quilts reveal the "flow of common life" while providing a context for political events. Discerning the historical significance of these handmade objects is not easy, however. Between today and eighteenth-century New England there looms a formidable nineteenth-century mythology that romanticized that earlier, colonial era, with its houschold production system, as a simpler time of hard work and virtuous self-sufficiency. This myth emerged as compensation for the extreme wealth and poverty generated by industrialization. As household production declined, and factory-made, store-bought goods became widespread, antiquarians avidly collected and displayed the handmade objects of their idealized forebears. Attentive to the ideological distortions of nineteenth-century mythmaking, most historians are wary of trying to discern the original meaning of colonial objects, assuming that, nowadays, such objects reveal more about nineteenth-century collectors than about eighteenth-century users. By contrast, rather than disparaging the mythmakers, Ulrich thanks them for saving so many objects made and used by ordinary women.
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The passage is primarily concerned with discussing
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The passage identifies which of the following as a source of difficulty for historians attempting to draw conclusions from the hand-sewn objects referred to in the passage?
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Regarding the “myth,” it can be inferred that Ulrich would probably disagree with most historians over
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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According to the passage, which of the following is true of the collisions mentioned in the highlighted sentence?
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Which of the following would have been true of the collision that the author of the passage theorizes gave rise to Earth's Moon?
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The passage suggests that which of the, following is true of the cited "compounds and elements"?
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Which of the following, if true, provides most support for the archaeologists' contention?
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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In the context of the passage, "signs of purposeful shaping" are significant for which of the following reasons?
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According to the passage, sloth bones found at Pikimachay have been used by some scholars in an effort to determine which of the following?
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In regard to 1920s French cinema, the passage is primarily concerned with
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The author of the passage suggests which of the following about the critics mentioned in the highlighted sentence?
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Which of the following statements about the "claim" is most consistent with the view expressed by the author of the passage?
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