The American Revolution Told from Inside the Home
The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence
A talk by Lauren Duval (University of Oklahoma)
This is a look at the American Revolution from inside the home. 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. Building on a stunning wealth of primary sources, Lauren 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 an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and a historian of early North America specializing in women’s and gender history and the era of the American Revolution. She is the author of The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2025). She has published an award-winning article from this project in the William and Mary Quarterly as well as contributed chapters to several edited collections about the American Revolution. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia.
