Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, April 29

Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will give a talk, "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History," at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 29, in Ferris Lounge, Seymour Union, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. The talk is free and open to the public.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, Ulrich is president-elect of the American Historical Association.

The talk is drawn from Ulrich's most recent book of the same title -- a sentence that first appeared in a scholarly article she wrote in 1976. Starting in 1996, the sentence began appearing on bumper stickers, t-shirts, buttons, greeting cards, and coffee mugs. Ulrich's talk examines how her sentence was turned into a popular catchphrase, and explores what being "well behaved" has to do with "making history."

Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, where she has been honored with awards for excellence in teaching. Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women's history, and material culture.

Ulrich's other books are "Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750"; "A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary," which won the Pulitzer Prize for History; and "The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth." She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992.

The lecture is sponored by Phi Beta Kappa and the Knox College History Department.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 45 states and 44 nations. Knox's 'Old Main' is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.