The Home Front

""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