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The Spurgin family of North Carolina experienced the cataclysm of the American Revolution in the most dramatic ways―and from different sides. This engrossing book tells the story of Jane Welborn Spurgin, a patriot who welcomed General Nathanael Greene to her home and aided Continental forces while her loyalist husband was fighting for the king as an officer in the Tory militia. By focusing on the wife of a middling backcountry farmer, esteemed historian Cynthia Kierner shows how the Revolution not only toppled long-established political hierarchies but also strained family ties and drew women into the public sphere to claim both citizenship and rights―as Jane Spurgin did with a dramatic series of petitions to the North Carolina state legislature when she fought to reclaim her family’s lost property after the war was over.
While providing readers with stories of battles, horse-stealing, bigamy, and exile that bring the Revolutionary era vividly to life, this book also serves as an invaluable examination of the potentially transformative effects of war and revolution, both personally and politically.
Book Purchase: To purchase this book please click on this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813949912
About Cynthia Kierner: Cynthia A. Kierner is Professor of History at George Mason
University and the author of Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America. I have two more women’s history projects in the works, at opposite ends of the chronological arc of U.S. history. One is a twentieth-century biography tentatively titled “Mother of the Mets: The Life and Times of Joan Whitney Payson.” The other is a group biography of the women who staged a fairly famous procession to welcome George Washington when he passed through Trenton, New Jersey, in 1789, en route to assuming the presidency in New York City. Currier and Ives, among others, produced visual representations of the “Ladies of Trenton,” and I’m interested in both the women themselves and how they were portrayed and remembered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.