A01=Lauren Duval
American households
American Revolution
Author_Lauren Duval
British Army
Category=NHK
Category=NHW
Category=NHWF
domestic life in revolutionary America
domestic life in the early American republic
domestic servants during the American Revolution
domestic tranquility
enslaved people during the American Revolution
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eq_history
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family life during the American Revolution
family life in the early American republic
founding values
home front during the American Revolution
Meschianza
military occupation during the American Revolution
property destruction during the American Revolution
property owners during American Revolution
quartering during the American Revolution
Revolutionary War
social life during the American Revolution
women in the American Revolution
Product details
- ISBN 9781469690056
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 16 Dec 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Lauren Duval is assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.
