MARLA R. 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. Her books include "Betsy Ross and the Making of America". She is a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and directs the Public History program there. 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.