Most American academics start their careers researching something small and obscure, and ­then—­if they’re lucky—­work their way up to topics of larger import and scope. Only at the pinnacle of their profession are they permitted to muse on sweeping themes. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is at or near that pinnacle. She has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard. And the urge to muse, rather than strictly analyze, is evident in ­

, a quirky meditation on women’s lives and the ways they are portrayed or, more often, forgotten by the retellers of ­history.

Women’s lives are Ulrich’s scholarly territory. In 1990, after raising a family and starting a career late, she leapt to prominence with the publication of 

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812

. In this painstaking, ground­break­ing tour de force, Ulrich reconstructed a Maine midwife’s life from her diary and teased out of it a vast trove of information concerning the workings of a New England community in the early days of the American republic, from how people traveled and what drugs they took for their ailments to the way they dealt with sexual liaisons outside ­marriage.

The book won a Pulitzer Prize, a Bancroft Prize, and half a dozen other honors, and was made into a PBS documentary. Meanwhile, a line from a scholarly article Ulrich had written in 1976, ­“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” had achieved escape velocity. Taken up as a feminist mantra by young activists, it started appearing online, then on ­T-­shirts. Ulrich began to wonder what larger lesson she had stumbled on about her chosen work, the unearthing and teaching of women’s ­history.

Exploring that lesson requires a technique very different from the one Ulrich used to rediscover Ballard. The midwife, rare among women of her era, kept a record of a regular life filled with such “women’s work” as delivering babies, bartering goods, and doing laundry. But women who “made history” in the standard sense were different: To attain anything recognizable to historians as status or influence, Ulrich suggests, women have had to “misbehave.” And misbehavior brought danger and, frequently, oblivion. We remember only those who successfully “negotiated the boundary between invisibility and scandal.”

Of necessity, this story must feature women heard of before. Ulrich weighs the conflicting views and accounts of figures as various as the classical Amazons, Harriet Tubman, and Virginia Woolf, pondering their forms of “misbehavior” and where they led. Sometimes women are remembered for things they didn’t even do. Lady Godiva, for example, was a pious ­11th-­century philanthropist who would have soon been forgotten, but the story of her riding naked through the streets to spare her people heavy taxes, likely later concocted by an English monk, earned her a place in ­history.

Ulrich’s imaginative way with sources occasionally shows itself, notably in her use of records from English “bawdy courts” of Shakespeare’s day, in which the church tried women (and men) for sexual crimes such as fornication. Documentation abounds, of course, of women accused of misbehavior as a way of stymieing their other activities. But some finds are still striking. The antebellum Southern writer William Gilmore Simms exclaims of abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Mrs. Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table.”

Yet Ulrich’s true soul mates in this book are not her eminent troublemakers but women such as the medieval writer Christine de Pizan, who recast women’s history and argued for their dignity in 

 (1405). Pizan herself was rediscovered during a wave of transformation in the field of history in the 1970s and ’80s, when narrow visions of how women should be have were expanded as evidence amassed of how women have behaved over the centuries. As a historian who draws intellectual sustenance from that movement, Ulrich knows deep down that a fascinating fact trumps a clever aphorism every time. “Details,” she writes, “let us out of boxes created by slogans.”

. By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Knopf. 284 pp.

Cover photo courtesy of Flickr/Kheel Center

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Amy E. Schwartz looks at “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.”

The Vice Squad

There is nothing new under the sun, says the Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes. But even the Preacher might have arched an eyebrow at the variety of innovations that crowd under the umbrella name of American Judaism. Freed by modernity from age-old prejudices and restrictions, and mostly emerged now from a generation that focused with near-exclusive intensity on Holocaust remembrance and support for Israel, Jews in America have produced an astonishing array of personal and communal practices. Variants range from Jubus (Jews influenced by Buddhism) to

 (those raised secular who return to rigorous observance as adults), plus countless improvisers such as the fellow Ari Goldman described several years ago in his book 

, who observed the laws about avoiding leavened bread during Passover by taking a piece of matzah to baseball games and substituting it for the bun around his nonkosher hot dog.

Dana Evan Kaplan, a rabbi in the Reform movement, the leftmost of the three major Jewish denominations, sees broad, unifying themes in this churning disorder. American Jews, he says, internalized the country’s cultural values during the 20th century. Now, as the traditional denominations and synagogue communal structures fade, those values have powered the revival of Jewish identity and practice among America’s roughly six million Jews through distinctively American quests for individual spiritual fulfillment.

This is not a new idea, but Kaplan’s survey of the landscape is enhanced by some unexpected examples. He traces the influence of basic civic values such as choice and individualism, particular political values such as feminism and environmentalism, and subtler Christian cultural inflections such as a preference for a publicly proclaimed spirituality—“peak moments,” often in public, of accepting God in the heart—over the traditional Jewish spirituality arising from adherence to commandments and membership in the community. This preference for moments of public commitment, he suggests, helps account for the increased prominence of life cycle milestones such as the bar mitzvah.

Kaplan’s gallery of American-inflected Jewish innovators is entertaining and mostly illuminating, though his sympathy for some of the wackier ones may outdistance the reader’s. There are “adventure rabbis” who seek to give their congregants Jewish spiritual experiences through hiking and kayaking expeditions, “aboriginal” Jews striving to incorporate Native American practices, “God-is-a-verb” mystics who link Jewish faith to social activism, and Web surfing Lubavitcher Hasidim whose 18th-century worldview has proved surprisingly compatible with high-tech outreach techniques. (These include the Mitzvah Mobile, which cruises city streets seeking Jews who might like to fulfill a mitzvah, or commandment, and innumerable Web sites offering practical information on ritual requirements.)

Kaplan ascribes to egalitarianism and individualism some developments not hitherto seen as especially spiritual—for instance, the Reform movement’s controversial 1983 decision to count children of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother as Jewish if they are being raised Jewish. (Traditionally, only children of a Jewish mother have been recognized as Jews, a position still upheld by most denominations.) The same sense of spiritual autonomy put tremendous pressure on clergy to solemnize intermarriages. Couples “felt they had a right to make whatever personal decisions they wanted,” Kaplan writes, “and they expected the clergy to validate their choices without hesitation.”

He characterizes the patrilineal descent decision as “widely seen as a tremendous success,” reflecting his tilt toward the viewpoint of his own Reform movement—perhaps the likeliest to engage in the kind of values syncretism he describes. In discussing the frantic efforts of traditional synagogues to regain some traction in the religious marketplace, he shows a weakness for management jargon, for congregational re-visioning exercises and retreats and curriculum development initiatives. Just often enough, though, Kaplan emerges from the bureaucratic/theological thicket with a twinkle in his eye. Most American families, he admits, still look for three things in a synagogue: “a quality preschool, a caring rabbi, and a short commute.”

As for the wails of impending catastrophe that inevitably accompany evolutions in Jewish practice, Kaplan contributes his share—he is a rabbi, after all—but with a refreshing air of restraint. In 1964, he reports, “the original

 magazine published a cover story . . . on ‘The Vanishing American Jew.’ The magazine cited what was to become the usual litany of sociological problems: Jews were not particularly devout, increasing numbers were intermarrying, fertility rates were low.” Though he calls the passage “eerily clairvoyant,” Kaplan concedes that there is another side: “Cynics would later point out that

magazine itself disappeared not once but twice, while the Jews remained.”

"Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal"

 by Dana Evan Kaplan, Columbia University Press, 2009.

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Tracing the history of Judaism  in its many forms in America.