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Marla Miller’s primary research interest is U.S. women’s work before industrialization. Her book The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in August 2006, and won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. In 2009 she published an edited collection, Cultivating a Past: Essays in the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, also with the University of Massachusetts Press. Her book Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Holt, 2010)–a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman–was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History at McGill University (the world’s largest non-fiction historical literature prize), and was named to the Washington Post’s “Best of 2010” list. A short biography of Massachusetts gownmaker Rebecca Dickinson appeared in the Westview Press series Lives of American Women in summer 2013. She is presently completing work on a microhistory of women, work and landscape in Federal Massachusetts.

Miller also publishes in the field of Public History. In 2016, with UMass Amherst colleague Max Page, she published Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States(University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).  In 2012, she and three co-authors released Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, a multi-year study funded by the NPS Chief Historian’s office and hosted by the Organization of American Historians. In 2013, Imperiled Promise won the National Council on Public History prize for Excellence in Consulting.

In addition to her own scholarship, Professor Miller contributes to her fields of study as an editor.  She has served on the editorial board of the Public Historian, and is the founding editor of the prizewinning UMass Press series Public History in Historical Perspective, and has or is currently serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Early Republic and the New England Quarterly.

As Director of the History Department’s Public History program, Professor Miller teaches courses in Public History, American Material Culture, Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and History Communication.  She also continues to consult with a wide variety of museums and historic sites. In 2016, Professor Miller was elected vice president/president elect of the National Council on Public History.

Recent Publications

Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016; co-editor.

Rebecca Dickinson (Lives of American Women series). Boulder, CO: Westview Press/Perseus, 2013.

University of Massachusetts Amherst: A Campus Guide. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013; with Max Page.

Betsy Ross and the Making of America. New York: Henry Holt, 2010.

Cultivating A Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009; editor.

The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.

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#Marlaatlarge

Country Focus

USA

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

18th century

Expertise by Topic

American Founding Era, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Museums, Public History, Women