... rich and highly enjoyable.

Zabin begins in Ireland, where women waited to find out if the British army would send them with their husbands to the American colony. Zabin’s research unearths fascinating details about these women, whose stories have not been told: about their fight to stay with husbands they worried they’d never see again and how they adjusted to life in America.

This is big-picture history told on a human scale. Generals, politicians, and other key players get their say, but Zabin is more interested in the lives of ordinary people, especially women. With the help of research assistants, she mined archival records to trace in remarkable detail the experiences of military wives.

Zabin changes this familiar story into a familial one. The result is a lively gem of a book that expands our views of early-modern military life, pre-revolutionary Boston, and, in turn, the American Revolution.

By focusing on individual experiences, especially those of British army wives, Zabin highlights the role of women in this world and emphasizes the personal camaraderie that emerged on all social levels even as the military occupation raised tensions to a breaking point. By recovering such realities, she shows how the trials that followed the Boston Massacre were used as a first step in writing this 'cross-cultural community' out of history, a necessity for revolution. Zabin’s engaging history adds nuance and complexity to the political and social aspects of the American Revolution..

Zabin spends little time dissecting the massacre itself, which has been studied in detail by other scholars. Instead, the author focuses on the personal lives of those who contributed to the tensions between soldiers and citizens.