Betsy Ross and the Making of America by Marla R. Miller

Miller, who teaches American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, believes that Claypoole “planted the seeds of her own mythology in the 1820s and ’30s as she regaled her children and grandchildren with tales from her youth, her work, and of life in Revolutionary Philadelphia.” In an engaging biography, Miller shows that even though the flag story is riddled with improbabilities, the life of the woman who came to be known as Betsy Ross is worth recovering. Only later, as the story took off, did she become the beautiful and patriotic “Betsy Ross.”

Claypoole.” That is the name that her grandson, William Canby, used in 1870 when he first began to tell the story about the flag. In fact, for most of her adult life, she was known as “Mrs. John Claypoole, whom she married in 1783, was the father of all but one of her surviving children. The second, a mariner named Joseph Ashburn, died in a British prison after being captured as a privateer toward the end of the Revolutionary War. Her first husband, the upholsterer John Ross, introduced her to Revolutionary politics.

Born in 1752, she married and buried three husbands before her own death in 1836. Betsy Ross gives women a place in the national pantheon without disrupting our dominant myths.īuried beneath the legend was a real woman, Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole. The legend endures because publishers, souvenir sellers and patriotic boosters find it useful and because it fills a void in the American epic. Across the country, schoolchildren still cut out five-pointed stars using the pattern that Ross, a Philadelphia flag maker, supposedly invented. Yet despite a century of debunking, the legend endures. She has won the Organization of American Historians' Lerner- Scott Prize for the best dissertation in Women's History and the 1998 Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Colonial History.Most historians dismiss the story about Betsy Ross making the first American flag. She is a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and directs the Public History program there. MILLER, a historian of early American women and work, has made a career uncovering the lives of women who left little in the way of a documentary record. Miller pieces together the fascinating life of this little-known and much beloved figure, showing that she is important to our history not just because she made a flag, but because she embraced the resistance movement with vigor, reveled in its triumphs, and suffered its consequences. Miller recovers for the first time the full story of Betsy Ross, sharing the woman as she truly was. Perhaps with one snip of her scissors she convinced the nation's future first president that five-pointed stars suited better than six. Beyond the legend of the creation of the American flag, we know very little about the facts of Betsy Ross' life.

Betsy Ross and the Making of America by Marla R. Miller