Overview

Prior to the American Revolution, the urban centers of colonial North America had little direct experience of war. With the outbreak of violence, British forces occupied every major city, invading the most private of spaces: the home. By closely considering the dynamics of the household —how people moved within it, thought about it, and wielded power over it— The Home Front reveals the ways in which occupation fundamentally upended the structures of colonial society and created opportunities for unprecedented economic and social mobility. In occupied cities, British officers usurped male authority to quarter themselves with families, patriot wives governed households in their husbands' absence, daughters flirted with officers, domestic servants disappeared with soldiers, and enslaved kin absconded to British lines in pursuit of freedom. As Lauren Duval shows, the unique conditions of occupation produced an aggrieved American population bound by shared emotional distress and domestic disorder. In the wake of this deeply disorienting experience, elite Americans deliberately reconsecrated the private home as a national symbol that epitomized masculine authority. Building on a stunning wealth of primary sources, Duval vividly captures daily life during the Revolution through the eyes and ears of those who intimately experienced it, showing how men and women of all races, statuses, and states of freedom understood its implications for their lives, families, and the nascent American Republic.

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9781469690056

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Reviews

""By separating revolutionary households into component parts--husbands, wives, daughters, servants, and enslaved people--Duval's brilliant analysis shows that the British occupation created possibilities for resistance by persons traditionally subordinated to male household heads. In so doing, she confirms the truth of John Adams's famous observation that 'masculine systems' were in danger and persuasively argues that such fears lead to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity.""--Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University ""The Home Front is an entirely revolutionary way to understand the American Revolutionary War. In this captivating and deeply researched book, Duval reveals that the battles of the Revolution were hardly confined to the battlefields; instead, the British occupation of colonial America's largest cities threw colonists' most intimate spaces into turmoil and made domestic life central to the Revolution's aims and outcomes.""--Serena Zabin, Carleton College

Author Information

Lauren Duval is assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.

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