Border to Border

For over two decades, volunteers from across Montana registered local quilts as a part of the Montana Historic Quilt Project. The quilts chronicle Montana's history over the last 150 years, telling the stories of statehood, the struggle for women's suffrage, two world wars, the Great Depression, as well as the recent past. This highly illustrated book showcases the Montana's best, most unique, and most interesting quilts and describes the life and times of the extraordinary people who made them. Border to Border: Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana is an invaluable addition to quilting literature and to Montana history.

• Over 150 rich, full-color photography of quilts
• Over 50 historical photographs
• Authentic, well-researched histories of individual quilts and quiltmakers

Excerpt:
(from foreword)

Border to Border: Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana is the culmination of the efforts of dozens, probably even hundreds, of quilters dedicated to preserving Montana's quilt legacy. Although they might not have known it, the Montana Historic Quilt Project volunteers were making significant contributions to the study of history by tracking folk art objects made traditionally by women. We tend to think that historians spend all of their time researching in the archives, pouring through boxes and boxes of written records. But increasingly scholars who study the past are looking at the things people made as well as the writings they left behind.
Folklorist Henry Glassie, one of the earliest proponents of this type of research explained the value of including everyday objects in our study of the past: "Few people write. Everyone makes things. An exceptional minority has created the written record. The landscape is the product of the divine average." In other words, history becomes more democratic, more inclusive, if we look at things made by normal, everyday people.
In this context, quilts are extremely valuable because they have traditionally been made by women, a group that for a long time was left out of the study of history. Even if women left behind fewer written records than men in the past, looking at quilts allows scholars to trace changing technologies, aesthetics, and cultural values over time and to add women back into the story of American history.
I appreciate quilts for the contribution they can make to our understanding of American history, but in the process of researching and writing this book, I came to love Montana's quilts not because of their larger meanings but simply because they offer a starting point for telling individual stories. Ordinary Montanans did as much as the prominent ones to shape the history of the state, and their stories deserve greater recognition. In little snapshots, quilts made or brought here by everyday folk tell the story of Montana that you never fully understand when you read about Lewis and Clark, General Custer, or the Copper Kings.