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Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)
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Lauren Duvall
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Lauren Duvall
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Lauren Duvall
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Carolyn Eastman
welcome Podcast Friends to Revolutionary America, a podcast hosted by the New Books Network in collaboration with the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, known fondly as sheer. I'm Carolyn Eastman, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the president of Scheer, and we're here to talk with the author Lauren Duvall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, about her new book, the Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American independence, published in December 2025 by the Omahundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press. Welcome, Lauren thank you, Carolyn.
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Lauren Duvall
Delighted to be here.
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Carolyn Eastman
In turning our attention to the effects of war on American women and men, black and white, who experienced military occupation under the British, Lauren Duvall focuses on households. Households were, of course, the primary social and economic unit of the era. It's impossible to talk about early American history without acknowledging the importance of the household when it comes to the law, politics, religion, education, the institution of slavery, gender and sexuality, of course, and so many other areas of early American life. But when it comes to the revolution, few have considered what military occupation might have meant to the people who experienced it from within the walls of their own homes. In fact, you say in the book, quote, most people encountered the violence of war not on the battlefield but in their households. So in other words, they experienced the war not as individuals but as mothers, children, fathers, brothers. So their take on the conflict might not have reflected abstract ideas like taxation without representation, but rather what was happening to their immediate families as a result. Because it's focused on the central importance of the household in the 18th century, this book manages to bring together the histories of gender and race as much as ideology, cases of men as much as women, military history as much as that of domestic life. So, Lauren, can you talk a bit about the overall project and how you came to it?
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Lauren Duvall
Yeah. So I first came to this project in graduate school, actually. I was working on a research seminar paper and knew I wanted to write about women in the revolution, so I kind of started there, and I went to grad school in D.C. so I was also kind of looking for source spaces that were nearby. And as I was reading about the revolution in Philadelphia, kept coming across this ball that occurs at the end of the occupation called the Mestianza, Right? It's the elaborate retirement party for Sir General Howe, Sir General William Howe. And a lot of ink has been spilled talking about just the pageantry and the symbolism because British officers dress up like knights and they joust, and American women are dressed in Turkish costumes. Right. It's elaborate and kind of ridiculous in a lot of ways. And so it's. It's also gotten a lot of attention from scholars interested in colonialism and kind of thinking about how this ball speaks to the bigger ideological conflicts in the war. But what really struck me as I was looking at this is there was so much written about this one night, and it occurs at the very end of the British Army's time in Philadelphia. And so I got very curious about, you know, well, what had happened the previous nine months, Right. What was it like for these civilians who had an army coming in, taking over their cities, Right. Moving into their schools, officers moving into their households, having to walk through the city under surveillance, go to market, have their purchases surveilled. And so just really wanted to dig into kind of that daily experience of occupation. So started there in Philadelphia, found some really amazing sources and stories, and so then started building out from there. Kind of wanted to see if that held up in other cities. And so also then went to look at Charleston, South Carolina. Newport, Rhode Island, New York, Boston and Savannah. As I built out their projects, I could kind of look at every city the British army was in. And in each of those, really just wanted to center this experience of war for civilians who kind of have their worlds upended, right? When the British army shows up, when there's this unprecedented violence in their communities, as they're having armies and troops really upend daily life. And so that's kind of where the project started.
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Carolyn Eastman
You know, this is fascinating because I think one of the things that's so arresting about your book, the Home Front, is the way that some of these. The topics that dominate other books. So, for example, the divide between patriots and loyalists or the drama of military action, all of that starts to drop away a little bit. And I began to realize that any given family's political affiliations or affection for King George started to matter less than their intimate experience of military occupation. Can you follow up on that sort of. That balance between the political and ideological story of the revolution as contrasted with what war felt like to these people?
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Lauren Duvall
Yeah, so I think we have this sense of the revolution as kind of this starkly partisan ideological contest between revolutionaries and loyalists and then some neutral or disaffected people in the middle. But when we look at these occupied cities, what we see is that politics often matters far less than we might think. And it's for a few different reasons. I mean, first is the violence that we often don't talk about a lot on the home front. So a lot of these cities that I look at were sites of battles or sieges, and this is a really unprecedented experience for urban civilians. Warfare in the 18th century often occurs in the backcountry, right? There's not a lot of fighting happening in these cities. Troops are occasionally garrisoned there. But for a lot of people, warfare is this totally new, terrifying experience. Right. And there are kind of battles happening, bombs going off in cities, cannons coming through windows. Right. Civilians write about waking up with their heads pounding from the noise of the cannon, the ground shaking like earthquakes. And so this is a really terrifying experience for a lot of people that first and foremost, when violence to send someone in their communities, they're worried about their families and their loved ones and their property, right? And so those are kind of the early days of occupation. And then once the army gets there, people are having to make very pragmatic decisions about what to do in this moment. Right. Because the British army typically, you know, civilians know they're coming, right. It's hard to sneak up with a huge, huge set of forces. So, typically, men who are starkly opposed to the British army will often flee before they arrive. They leave their wives behind, trusting that they can protect property in their absence. And so often when the British army shows up, they have this group of civilians that are primarily women. There are also loyalist men there as well. But it is this very interesting gendered civilian population, and that really connects to the political ideology of the time, where men are Expected to choose a side in this. Right. So if the British army shows up and they're asking men to say, will you swear allegiance to the Crown? But they don't hold women to the same standard because women are seen as non combatants. Actually, the rules of war place women, children, the elderly, clergy, kind of outside the scope of military conflict, as long as they don't harm military aims. A lot of that's in theory. It doesn't always play out that way in practice. But there is this sense that women should be protected, particularly in here. I'm talking a lot about kind of elite and middling white women or who the army's talking about. And they're thinking about protecting ladies. But that means that women actually have a lot of flexibility in these cities as well. They're able to move more freely. And that really changes the way that civilians experience the war because it means that it's often women of various statuses who are out moving about the city, interacting with soldiers that are there when the army shows up. And so the great thing as a historian is this also generates a lot of documentation. Right. When husbands and wives are in different places, they're often writing to one another to kind of say, here's what's going on with the household, here's what's going on with our family, here's what the city looks like right now. And so it's a really great way to kind of look at this very intimate experience of war as it's happening on cities and streets and neighborhoods as families are writing to tell one another about, here's what we're dealing with in this moment. Right. And I think when we do that, the war looks a lot messier. Right. It's not as clear cut. There's a lot of flexibility in how the choices people are making to protect themselves, protect their families. I think it's surprising, Right. Kind of just how war plays out on a day to day basis in a way that doesn't quite jive the mythologized vision of the revolution we have.
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Carolyn Eastman
So you referred to the fact that there are six cities that you study in the book. The six cities that were occupied at various times during the Revolution. Can you tell us what those cities are? And maybe you're obviously trying to understand them as sharing a certain kind of general experience, but there were also differences between experiences between those different cities. So. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the landscape here.
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Lauren Duvall
Yeah. So the six cities are Boston, Newport, Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah. And so they're all Occupied for different lengths of time at different points in the war. New York for the longest. New York is occupied for almost the entire war. Philadelphia is the shortest, coming in at nine months. But I think one of the things kind of thinking about this, there obviously are differences. There's regional differences in terms like population demographics and things like the size of the enslaved population. Right. All of that really matters when we're looking at say, Boston versus Savannah. Right. And I think it's important to be attentive to those differences. But one of the things that also looking at this from a bird's eye view and trying to take in all six cities becomes very clear is that there are these things that connect all of them. Despite the differences between these cities, these kind of domestic familial concerns are at the fore for a lot of people of very different statuses and situations. Right. And I think that to me was really compelling with kind of looking into those stories, what connects all of these cities despite their differences.
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Carolyn Eastman
You know, and it, it didn't occur to me, but you just mentioned this, that because men who were affiliated with the patriot side would have fled the city, you had an unusual ability to find letters and other forms of documentation in occupied cities that you might not find elsewhere where families weren't divided. Is that right?
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Lauren Duvall
Absolute. There's conversations that previously would have happened over dinner or in passing are suddenly all in letters. And so it becomes this really, as a historian, this really amazing way to kind of get inside the household and understand what's happening on a day to day basis where people are moving, kind of where furniture is being placed, all kind of just the intricacies of daily life and the mundanity of it. Right. Which I think is actually really compelling.
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Carolyn Eastman
Oh, that's fascinating. So another thing I think that we think about when we think about the revolution in a kind of, you know, the popular understanding of the revolution is we like to think about these sort of firebrand, anti authoritarian Americans jostling the political order to rebel against the British. I mean, it's a bit of a fantasy, but it's also a fantasy that privileges a very particular kind of American, whether male or female. But the story you're telling is so different. Can you talk about what military occupation actually looked like for American households and how it threatened their sense of social order?
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Lauren Duvall
Yeah. So occupation was really destabilizing for a lot of households. Right. Because kind of pre war. Right. The way, as you know. Right. Households are foundational to the social order. Right. The idea is that a man rules over his household to his dependents, right? But all of that kind of goes out the window in occupied cities, right? Because the city is under martial law, which means that the British army is now in charge of these households, not men. And so there's kind of that element, combined with the absence of a lot of householders, creates these really different dynamics in households and occupied cities where people who are traditionally subordinated within domestic hierarchies, whether it's kind of white women, domestic servants, both black and white, enslaved families, suddenly have a lot less surveillance or kind of oversight over their daily life and labors, right? And they have new opportunities to pursue. To pursue paths that make their life better, to exert power over the spaces where they reside. And I think that looks. It looks really different for different people, right? I think it's one of the things that comes out of this research. It just shows how contradictory this experience was for different people in the same household, right? So even if we think about quartering, right. Which I think is one of the really interesting aspects of occupation, right? Because we all learned about the quartering act growing up as one of the factors leading to the revolution, and we have this sense that it's hostile. British officers kind of forcing themselves onto families, right? And in practice, that looks a little different. It's a bit more nuanced, right? They're kind of strict. That does happen sometimes, to be fair. But there are pretty strict rules, the British army, about how quartering can happen, about which houses can be used, how much room an officer can take. He has to compensate the householder for his use of room, right. There's also gender norms where officers are usually quite willing to respect the requests. So kind of female heads of household. But if we look at quartering kind of through the lens of the household, juxtaposing those military policies with what's panning out in real life, we see that, you know, for a male householder, a courted officer might seem as really potent threat to his property rights, right? And they might clash a lot over it. For his wife, the officer might seem polite, right. And someone who socializes with her friends. For a domestic servant, the officer might be a potential employer, right? Perhaps a path out of domestic service, perhaps a sexual partner. Maybe he has servants who are prospective husbands. For an enslaved family, the officer, due to various British emancipatory proclamations that happened throughout the war, could be a path to freedom. And so kind of looking at occupation really exposes this nexus, the kind of contradictory choices that evolves in these households in ways that are really, I think, both liberating and disorienting for people, depending upon their position within the household.
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Carolyn Eastman
That's fascinating. And thank you also for sort of breaking apart this huge and complicated category of both men and women. Right. I mean, you really dedicate serious time here to a whole range of people living in these households. So it's not just the sort of classic householder and his female head of household. It's all of the people under their roof. And I thought maybe you could go into a little more detail there about how, on the one hand, the military occupation could threaten many men's sense of power and authority and their sense of control over their own families. But for some women, both black and white, they could find a new kind of freedom in occupied cities to, as you say, to work for or form relationships with military men, relationships that did not always prove liberatory in the end. So can you talk about that sort of relevant relative degree of freedom that women could experience?
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Lauren Duvall
Absolutely. So I think one of the things that became very clear as I got into this project is that a lot of historians have written about how British emancipatory policies kind of disrupt slavery throughout the colonies. Right. And that's a really important part of this, is that kind of when the British army shows up because they're offering freedom to enslaved people, and this is a military measure. Right. It's not necessarily done out of abolitionist motives. Right. But to deprive revolutionaries of valuable labor resources. But the effect of that is that a lot of enslaved families are able to seize this moment, to attempt to secure freedom for themselves and their kin. Right. And there are still dangers behind British lines, but it is kind of this chance that they haven't previously had. And with occupation, the British army is kind of physically moving around the colonies, and that actually makes destinations of freedom change throughout the war. So suddenly, it might be much easier for someone residing in kind of rural South Carolina to get to Charleston. Right. Than it would have been to get all the way north to get out of the colonies. Right. And so it creates these new destinations of refuge within cities that also helps both people who arrive there as refugees, but also people who are enslaved by Loyalists who might be in cities themselves. It gives them an opportunity to pursue freedom. Right. And technically, people, all people, but we're talking about women enslaved by loyalists are not eligible for British proclamations. They're technically kind of aimed at revolutionaries. But what we see happening in these cities is there's such large crowds of refugees. There's a lot of kind of Confusion. A lot of people are able to kind of hide in plain sight, right? Disappear into refugee communities. There are examples of enslaved women boarding British transports and going to other cities as the means of escaping slavery. But typically, when women make their bid for freedom in an occupied city, they typically align themselves with an officer. It's kind of a good way to get protection. So women might work as laundresses, as cooks, as nurses, doing a lot of the same labor that they would have done in revolutionary households. But there is a chance in these cities, it's provisional freedom. Nothing is secure until the end of the war. In fact, there are certainly threats of kidnapping, of violence, of re enslavement that existed in the city. But it is a chance to have this new opportunity that we see a lot of women seizing this moment, particularly women with children for whom flight might have been more difficult to travel long distances. And there's a lot of women. Some of the most compelling sources I found actually were women who were pregnant and made their way to British lines. Because in city, in areas under revolutionary control, children born to an enslaved woman are enslaved. But if they can make their way to British lines, their child can be born free, right? And so it's these really compelling examples of women kind of making bids for freedom in their 8th, 9th month of pregnancy to make sure they can kind of give birth behind British lines. So that's one way we see it playing out for enslaved women. For women who work as domestic servants, there are some similarities, right? The British army's presence really disrupts urban labor markets. Officers are looking for female companionship. They're looking for domestic service, and they're willing to pay, often in hard coin, which is increasingly rare as the war progresses and the value of paper money is plummeting. And so a lot of working women throughout these cities are able to leverage their labor, both kind of domestic and sexual, to get either new positions among the army or to kind of use the army's presence to ask their employer for raises or better conditions. But we do see a lot of women who choose to go to the army to find work. And there's actually a lot of kind of middle class civilians. Southeast cities complain about their inability to get servants because all of the women are going to the army. And there's an example, two really good examples actually, in the drinker household in Philadelphia, there are two different servants. One is a woman named Anne Kelly, who had this kind of dramatic night. After a British officer comes into the house and disrupts the family, she runs off with him. It Seems that they probably had talked about this ahead of time. But for her, it's clearly an attempt to get out of domestic service. She actually comes back to the Drinker household at some point, tries to get the stable boy to give her some buckles that she could then kind of pawn to pay off her time. Right. But when she's threatened by the drinkers to kind of come back, she's. She said, you know, you'll never have me. Right? Like, I have kind of hitched my wagon to the army, and I am on this new path now. Right? We don't know what happens to her. Elizabeth Drinker runs into the officer later in the occupation. He says Anne is no longer with him. Maybe true. Right. We do know a lot of women who form relationships such as this with officers. They are kind of temporary, right? They provide women with provisional protection, with some payments, especially rations. There are also a number of women who are left behind when the army moves on, some of them pregnant. And so it is kind of a precarious position, even though it is one that allows women a potential path out of domestic service. There's another servant in the Drinker household named Jane Boone, who ends up marrying a servant of the officer who's quartered in the house. So their relationship develops over time through this intimacy of quartering. And she also gets out of domestic service, but does so in this way that kind of sets her up on a new life. Right? And Elizabeth Drinker kind of keeps tabs on her over the years. The family does very well. Her husband becomes a doctor. Right. And so it kind of shows this moment of opportunity, kind of the different paths it could take for women. Right. I think a lot of women who work for a living are gambling on employment with the army, right. In this moment, that it could make their lives better. And some of them succeed, and for some of them, they end up in worse situations than they were before. But it really speaks to just all the possibilities that people see in this moment. Right? And I think that's a really interesting story of the Revolution that we don't think about. Right. I think so much of the way we've talked about working people during the Revolution has really been filtered through men, right? We talk about the sailors and the shoemakers and the kind of working men, the artisans who found political identity through the war and the politics of the revolution, but we know far less about women. And we kind of see in this moment that they, too, are trying to make their way through this conflict in ways that better their lives.
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Carolyn Eastman
Yeah, especially women who were not white, who were not middling status, who were not married. I mean, we have. When we do hear about women, we hear about a very small subset of them. So. And I mean, as I read the book, I mean, the book brings us this enormous array of people. Young women, anxious patriarchs, enslaved black women, German Soldiers, British officers, wives struggling to make do while their husbands languished in prison or served in the military. But it also, I think, keeps our eyes on the prize. So. Because ultimately your book focuses on the way that military occupation posed existential threats to household social order and property rights. So after all, according to longstanding Anglo American president, both legal and cultural, a man's house was his castle. And those ideals had a profound effect on the post war United States. Can you talk a little bit about the long term effects of military occupation on the early Republic and the ultimate transformation of gender and race relations after the war?
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Lauren Duvall
Yeah. I think one of the things that occupation does, right, Is it really makes the war. It brings into these intimate spaces in a way that is very disruptive, right. Very scary for a lot of particularly white Anglo Americans. Right. And throughout the war, a lot of people are very concerned about their safety, about the safety of their loved ones, the safety of their property, right? And that's something that resonates throughout the colonies, even among people who didn't personally experience occupation. These stories coming out of these cities are very relatable, right? Of people having officers quartered in their houses or enslaved people rising up in rebellion, right? Or kind of just the. All the stories that revolutionaries are circulating in this moment to show kind of like, hey, look how awful the British are. They're seducing your daughters and they're quartered in your house at 8. And that becomes a really powerful unifying narrative after the war, right? In part because it's true, right? These things do happen in these cities, but it also becomes a very effective metaphor to talk about British tyranny, right? The British coming into your house, into American households, disrupting American families, enticing enslaved laborers and domestic servants away, seducing daughters, disrespecting men's property rights. And that becomes a really effective metaphor at the end of the war to say American men have reclaimed their households. Now in the aftermath of the war, the British are gone. All of the threats and destabilization to the household that in many ways actually resulted from instabilities in the household itself. The British kind of just exposed them, they didn't introduce them. It's very easy to say the British caused these problems, not the inequities of the household. And it becomes this way for Americans to then kind of unify around this idea of, in the new nation, people are safe and secure in their households, right? And this idea of the vine and fig tree, right. Which is echoed again and again throughout the correspondence of The Founders. George Washington uses it quite often in his own correspondence. It becomes this rallying cry in the early Republic in a lot of ways, tethered to this mythology of George Washington, right. The retiring cincinnatus, the returning hero going home to domestic repose after the war. Right. That is his reward for all of his wartime sacrifices. And it's something that people throughout the nation can relate to, right. They all too want to do the same thing after eight years of civil war. They want to be home and safe with their families. And so this idea of kind of the safe, protected household becomes a really critical part of how Americans imagine independence and what that looks like in the new nation. And we see this playing out not only in culture, but also in things like novels, artwork, even some of the iconography of the new nation. These amazing peace medals that John Trumbull designs during Washington's administration that are sent out to indigenous nations, right. But they all depict domestic scenes, and it aligns with all of these founders, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Adams, talking about how domestic life is so key to the American character. And these things really become entangled in a lot of ways in the culture, in the government, and even in the laws of the new nation. If we look at things after the war, veterans are often rewarded with land bounties so they can go form their own households. The Bill of Rights has several protections against the protect property right. It prevents future quartering, protects property rights of patriarchs, allows people security in their households and their person. Right. And I think a lot of this really comes out of the disruption, military occupation introduced into households and the real fear that it engendered among Americans about kind of the security of their households. And so in the years after the revolution, that idea of a safe household, and one that really bolstered the property rights of heads of households, becomes critical to the rights of citizenship.
- [31:44]
Carolyn Eastman
Oh, this is fascinating. And, you know, it's making me remember, of course, many scholars have written about women and the revolution in the nearly 50 years since the enormously influential publication of two books in 1980, Linda Kerber's Women of the Republic and Mary Beth Norton's Liberal Liberty's Daughters. And on the one hand, I think Norton in her book told a more optimistic story about the effect of the revolution, whereas Kerber told perhaps what we might see as an ambivalent story about the long term effects of the revolution for women. But in your story, things look a little bit more conservative. That is, there's a much greater clampdown on the possibilities for women after the Revolution as maybe some of those fleeting opportunities during the war are shut down for single women, for enslaved women, certainly for women of color during the early republic. Does that sound right? And I'm curious about whether you could talk about the extent to which Kerber's and Norton's books were influential for you and maybe the extent to which other scholars have been influential for your work.
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Lauren Duvall
Yeah. So Norton and Kerber's books were hugely influential for me. Right. I think they did so much for me and for other scholars who really wanted to understand women's lives and roles during the revolution and into the early Republic. And I think one of the things that struck me in both of their books, right, is kind of that they both do talk quite a bit about domestic life, right. And kind of mention the disruption. And that for me was something kind of set me on this path, wanting to know more about that. Right. And I think one of the things that we've seen from scholarship in the intervening time is that it has wrestled with the revolution itself, Right. And I think, you know, for instance, my advisor, Kate Hallman, right. Has written a lot about fashion and kind of the way that these culture wars played out for women during the conflict itself. But a lot of scholars have really thought about the longer term effects. What were the consequences of the revolution for women's lives, for women's politics. And I think Rosemary Zagari's work looking at women's political identities in the early Republic and showing how even as women are pushed out of these formal political arenas, they're still exerting quite a bit of power over the politics of the nation and their own civic identities. And because of work like that and work kind of looking at how the revolution changed the way women thought about fertility and birth control, how they thought about divorce force, how they kind of thought about how it created new economic opportunities. There's a lot of ways that we know how the revolution changed American women's lives. But I really, really wanted to focus in on these war years. And so for that, going back to Kerber and Norton was hugely influential because it just a kind of is the origin point of a lot of these questions. And also the books themselves are just so well researched, right. It kind of gave me a starting point to kind of say, like, what other directions could I go, right. Rather than just thinking about, like, how did the war change women's lives? How was it different kind of before to after? And just to really pause in that middle point, right. And kind of say, like, well, what was. Even if things Got more conservative. Right. Even if things in some way resembled pre war life, how did they look different during the war itself? Right.
- [35:21]
Carolyn Eastman
Well, okay. I want to ask you a question about the research process, because this book could not have been easy to research and write. I can't imagine how much time you must have spent in these six American cities that were occupied by the British during the war, examining local archival collections, especially that kind of needle in a haystack research through all these collections of letters and diaries and court records. So can you speak more about that research and maybe some of the records that you found to be the most useful in your work?
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- [35:57]
Lauren Duvall
So one of the things I really wanted to do with this book was think about occupation holistically. Right. A lot of the way that domestic life has been written about typically looks at women's experiences, which is a really important part of what I wanted to do. But women don't exist in isolation domestic life. So I wanted to make sure. I also looked at how men were experiencing it, how other members of the household enslaved people. Domestic servants were also experiencing it. And so to do that, I looked at a really wide range of sources. So I went to all those six cities, basically looked at any family papers whose time chronology passed through the occupation. And then I also looked at military records, which I think was a really wonderful source base for this project in a couple ways. One is that civilians are all over military records. They are constantly interacting with the army. They are petitioning commanding officers, officers are writing about them. Courts martial, for instance, were an amazing source because it is actually typically civilians complaining about officers or British soldiers and they're testifying. And these records are all transcripts, right? And so it's kind of transcripts of what people are saying. Some of the people who are testifying may not have been literate, right? But we can suddenly hear their voices, right? For instance, there's courts martial that kind of have domestic servants testifying, right. Sometimes even enslaved people. Right? And so you get these perspectives that typically aren't written down in the traditional sources of the time that really also just kind of put you on the ground, right? And let you hear what people are experiencing on a day to day basis. And I think those military sources in a lot of ways were so wonderful for this project because they're just not a source that women's and gender historians or people interested in domestic life have typically looked at. Right? And so there was just this huge untapped source base that I could dig into and putting those sources next to the family Letters allowed me to see what's going on, big picture in these cities. The other source base that I used a lot was the diaries of British and Hessian officers, because they also kept quite elaborate diaries when they got to these cities. They're talking about the war, but they're also talking about the cities look like, what they're eating, how they're engaging with civilians. Right. What's going on in these houses that they're quartering in. One of my kind of favorite pieces of source work that happened was also to return to the Drinker household. So Elizabeth Drinker keeps a diary throughout the war. It's quite meticulous. She's recording what happens when a Scottish officer actually quarters in her house. Right. During the British occupation of Philadelphia. She's also writing letters to her husband at the same time. And so I was able to kind of put the two next to each other and say, like, you know, and her husband, she's saying, you know, I know you don't want us to interact with the officer. We rarely see him. We stay as far away as possible. Right. Which in a lot of ways tells us a lot more about Henry Drinker Spears than what's going on in the household. Right. Because when we look at Elizabeth Drinker's diary, we see that she is actually socializing with Major Crammond quite frequently right there, drinking tea. Crammond is going visiting with Elizabeth and her friends. Her friends are quite like the officer, which she's very pleased about. Right. He's walking her friends home in the evening. He's kind of obtained this place within the circle of the household. Right. It looks really different than what she's telling her husband. And this is not to say that anything untoward is happening, Right. But just that there are these relationships that develop in this moment because people are making their lives together in shared spaces. Right. And then to kind of add another layer onto that, you know, Elizabeth Drinker kind of describes some of her negotiations with Major Crammond when he wants to quarter in the house initially. Right. And she says, you know, British officers have been behaving quite badly. Right. I'm skeptical about this. My husband's not here, and he assures her that he'll behave well. And they essentially arrive at a set of rules. Right. He's not going to drink. He's not going to gamble. He's going to kind of stay in certain rooms of the house. And we know that he adheres to this not just because Elizabeth writes approvingly of his behavior. But I was Actually reading the diary of another officer in Kremman's regiment. And he described dining at the Drinker household one evening in 1778 and complained. I think it was his words. It was a showy dinner, but not much drink. Right. So we can kind of, by putting all of these kind of different perspectives into conversation with one another, we just get this really vibrant image of what's going on in these cities in a way that centers just what's happening day to day. Right. Kind of how people are surviving war, how they're surviving this disruption to their lives that I think looks just more human and messier. And to me, that's really compelling.
- [40:36]
Carolyn Eastman
Okay, so I think you now have a sense of the extent to which you have done needle in the haystack research, comparing all of these different sources, just about these key, like, evening events in the Drinker household. But I have to ask you, Lauren, so now that you are directing graduate students in their research, how do you talk to them about research strategies that are manageable given the limitations on research funding and everything else? I'm curious about whether you advise them to start with a question or to start with a topic like occupation and so on and how they go from there. I'm curious about you as an advisor.
- [41:21]
Lauren Duvall
Now, it's a great question. So I think, typically, I always tell graduate students to think big, right? Think what you want the most ambitious version of this project to be, and keep that in mind that you do want it to be manageable. And so it kind of varies based on the project. For some students, it is a question. For some students, it's a topic. It kind of depends how far they're progressed in their process. But one of the things I always tell them, because I think in my own research process this was really helpful, was to kind of let the sources guide them wherever they're starting, whether it's a question or a topic. Because I think the sources can take you in very unexpected places, and you need to be open to that rather than kind of getting to this predetermined endpoint that you think is there. And I think with that, it's okay to break the project down into smaller pieces. Like for me, for instance, this book started as my dissertation. My dissertation only looked at three cities. And then I always knew the plan was to get it to 6, but did in the early stages, kind of looked at Philadelphia, Charleston, and Newport because those were kind of the less studied of the occupied cities. And then I knew for the book I could do more research and weave in the additional ones. And so really encouraging students to see this as the first step in a longer process and to really do it in a way that allows them to have flexibility in where the sources lead them.
- [42:47]
Carolyn Eastman
That's fabulous. I also encourage that sort of source based work, but that can be hard because sometimes it's hard to know whether there's anything there. And you have to get students to trust their own instincts on building out from sources.
- [43:03]
Lauren Duvall
Absolutely.
- [43:03]
Carolyn Eastman
Okay, so I've got one more question. Looking at undergraduate teaching, and I'm curious about whether in the course of your research, you found sources that maybe you have come to use in your own teaching. When you teach about the revolution, are there things that have really worked in the classroom?
- [43:23]
Lauren Duvall
So there's a couple that come to mind, kind of generally speaking, Right. I found that bringing in things like petitions that civilians submit to officers during the war can be a really great way to kind of say, here's what's going on for kind of ordinary people navigating the revolution. Same with the Loyalist Claims Commission Papers, which are kind of at the end of the war in London, there's this committee basically where Loyalists can submit claims for lost property, for pensions from the government. And so it's a lot of people telling their stories. Here's what the war was like for me and my family. And so those can be very compelling sources for undergraduates to just say, look, the war looks a little different, right. If we kind of think about the way that it's playing out for ordinary people. There are two sources in particular that I really like to use. One is a court martial. So a court martial of the wife of a British soldier. She is court martialed for enticing her husband to desert. And she's an American woman. They married during the British occupation of Philadelphia. And this is like, as the army is moving out of Philadelphia, right, The commanding officer's suspecting that she's trying to lag behind and kind of keep her husband in Philadelphia. And the whole court martial kind of hinges on the fact that she's carrying a bundle of laundry. And her defense is like, I was doing laundry. And they're like, they can't prove that she was trying to run away, right. Like, they just. She was carrying clothes. But so it's again, kind of this. It exposes, right, Just how the ordinariness of some of these things, right. Even when we think about things like desertion, which we talk about a lot, but actually how it plays out and what it looks like for families, for couples. So I Think that one has always been fun to teach with. The other source that I like to use a lot is a letter written by a Continental officer soldier in South Carolina towards the end of the war. His name's Daniel Stevens. And it's describing what he has heard is a ball that takes place in occupied Charleston organized by three enslaved women, four British officers. And so he kind of described, you know, accounts that these women are dressed up in rich silks and fancy hairdos, that they're dancing with British officers until the small hours of the morning and eating these elaborate meals. And he's very enraged by all this.
- [45:41]
Podcast Advertiser
Right.
- [45:41]
Lauren Duvall
Kind of the way that British officers are, in his view, kind of not exhibiting proper mastery. Right. Over enslaved populations, and also how they're challenging the mastery of white slave owners by kind of socializing with enslaved women. And so I really like to teach with that one because it is this event that really upends all of our expectations of what's going on during the war and what it meant for American civilians, but also because it is this perspective of a kind of Continental observer saying, here's what I heard is going on. Right? And so there's layers to parse there. Not just what's happening in the city, but then how is it refracting back? How is it being interpreted by white Americans? How are they using these events to critique British officers and kind of elevate their own cause? And so it kind of allows students to start thinking through the source in ways that is not. Kind of moves beyond just like, what's going on.
- [46:34]
Carolyn Eastman
Oh, that's fabulous. Thank you, Lauren. This has been so great. Thank you so much. So once again, we've been discussing Lauren Duvall's new book, the Home Front, on behalf of the New Books Network and its new podcast series, Revolutionary America, in collaboration with the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. I'm Carolyn Eastman, thanking you and also noting that if you'd like to participate in this series to engage in conversations about new and classic books on the age of revolutions, please be in touch. You can contact me at my VCU email address or Edward Bloom at San Diego State University, who's spearheading this new project. Thank you for joining us.
- [47:17]
Lauren Duvall
Thank you.
- [47:30]
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