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: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2025) by Lauren Duval 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 such as New York City, 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 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 wealth of primary sources, Duval 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.
The author Lauren Duval is assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.
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Read more about the occupation of New York City during the American Revolution.
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