#49: Stitching History
Rachel May's new book, An American Quilt, has an innocuous enough title, invoking an innocent American pastime. But sometimes ugly secrets can be hidden in the stitchwork\u2014or even, as in the case of the quilt at the heart of May\u2019s book, behind it. The paper-pieced quilt was stitched together from fabric basted onto hexagon-shaped paper templates. These scraps, which turned out to be letters and documents dating all the way back to 1798, tie together one family from the abolitionist North and one from the slave-owning South. This paper trail led May to stitch together the stories of the women behind the quilt, enslaved and free. In the process, she shows how dependent the \u201cfree\u201d North was on the enslaved labor of its southern neighbor.
Go beyond the episode:
- Rachel May\u2019s An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery
- For a peek at the global history of the stuff quilts are made of, read an excerpt from Sven Beckert\u2019s Empire of Cotton
- Peruse the National Museum of American History\u2019s extensive National Quilt Collection
- The National Park Service offers a brief visual history of quilting in America, with a special focus on quilting in the West
- The Library of Congress has oral recordings with Appalachian quiltmakers, who discuss the social history of quilting
- The Whitney Museum\u2019s 1971 exhibition of \u201cAbstract Design in American Quilts\u201d ignited our contemporary quilting renaissance. To view these, and hundreds of others, you can peruse the online collection of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum
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