Families and Freedom: Journeys in the Revolutionary Northeast

The American Revolutionary era and its aftermath presented tremendous challenges to families across the Northeast. Members of diverse communities and sovereign nations contended with rapid upheavals, relocations, food and resource scarcity, and contested allegiances and visions of the future. This presentation illuminates the experiences of Native American, African-American, and Euro-colonial women who strategized to protect their own and their families’ needs and goals. Drawing from a forthcoming book featuring the intertwined stories of Violet Freeman, Ruth Waukeet, and Mary Stiles, it explores how they envisioned and pursued family wellbeing, material security, stability in cherished places, and other priorities. For each of these women, concepts like “freedom” and “independence” held distinct meanings. These meanings profoundly shaped their pathways forward, oftentimes across great distances and disparate forms of power and opportunity. This presentation also considers methods for approaching Revolutionary stories that are only partially present in conventional written archives, but that i…