History/ES 247 Reading Guide
Hallowell and Augusta: The Maine Frontier in the Early Republic
FILM: A Midwife’s Tale
- Review: “A Midwife’s Tale.” Written and produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt. Directed by Richard P. Rogers. (Watertown, Mass.: Blueberry Hill Productions, 1997), based on the book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990). by Sarah F. McMahon, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 55 (July 1998). JSTOR
Note: The film is 88 minutes long (this includes 4 minutes of credits at the end of the film). I will begin showing the film promptly at 11:30, in order to let you out at 12:55.
The film combines three narratives—and three methodologies.
- The first narrative belongs to Martha Ballard, a late eighteenth-century midwife from Maine. Over the course of 27 years, she wrote 9,965 entries in a diary that served as an account book and record for her medical practice as a midwife and lay healer, and in which she recorded occasional notations about her family life and the evolution of Hallowell, Maine, from a frontier village to a settlement on the Kennebec River .
- The second narrative belongs to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who rediscovered Ballard’s 200 year old diary in the Maine State Library in 1982. With a historian’s meticulous reading of the diary, combined with fragments from other primary sources, as well as secondary sources on Maine in that era, Ulrich recreated Ballard�s life and produced an insightful analysis of the issues and themes that shaped Ballard’s world.
- In the third narrative, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt’s film script weaves together the stories of these two women, beginning as a documentary about the historian’s process and gradually shifting to a dramatic narrative of Ballard’s life and world.
Note: We will discuss the film at the beginning of the next class.
