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Stephen A. McLeod
Director, Library Programs
703.799.8686
smcleod@mountvernon.org
America’s War for Independence dramatically affected the speed and nature of broader social, cultural, and political changes including those shaping the place and roles of women in society. Women fought the American Revolution in many ways, in a literal no less than a figurative sense. Whether Loyalist or Patriot, Indigenous or immigrant enslaved or slave-owning, going willingly into battle or responding when war came to their doorsteps, women participated in the conflict in complex and varied ways that reveal the critical distinctions and intersections of race, class, and allegiance that defined the era.
This collection examines the impact of Revolutionary-era women on the outcomes of the war and its subsequent narrative tradition, from popular perception to academic treatment. The contributors show how women navigated a country at war, directly affected the war’s result, and influenced the foundational historical record left in its wake. Engaging directly with that record, this volume’s authors demonstrate the ways that the Revolution transformed women’s place in America as it offered new opportunities but also imposed new limitations in the brave new world they helped create.
Graham Hodges is the George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History at Colgate University. He specializes in Colonial and revolutionary America, social history, labor and urban America, New York City, and Asian American history. He is co-editor, with Alan Edward Brown, of The Book of Negroes: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution (2021). His numerous publications include Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (2018); David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (2010); and Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciusko, and Agrippa Hull (2008). He is currently working on a one-volume history of New York City from its founding to the present; and a revision in time and space of the Underground Railroad.
Holly A. Mayer is Professor Emerita of History at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She was the 2021-2022 Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at the United States Military Academy, West Point, and the 2016-2017 Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. Her research interests include the social, cultural, and military histories of late 18th-century North America. She is the author of Congress's Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union (2021); and Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (1996). In addition to authoring various journal and anthology essays, Mayer was co-editor (with David E. Shi) of For the Record: A Documentary History of America, and editor of the anthology Women Waging War in the American Revolution.
Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Her research interests include siblings and kinship in colonial South Carolina, masculinity in the Early Republic, the seventeenth-century colonization of Virginia and Bermuda, the intersection of family and politics in the lives of leading American Revolutionaries, and the fierce debates over the ratification of the US Constitution. She has written extensively about early America, including Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution (2020); The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution (2016); and Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (2014). She is a frequent presenter at Mount Vernon and was a member of the Washington Library’s 2016-17 class of research fellows.
Stephen A. McLeod
Director, Library Programs
703.799.8686
smcleod@mountvernon.org
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