Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century [Hardcover]

On America’s western frontier, myths of prosperity concealed the brutal conditions endured by women, slaves, orphans, and the poor. As poverty and unrest took root in eighteenth-century Kentucky, western lawmakers championed ideas about whiteness, manhood, and patriarchal authority to help stabilize a politically fractious frontier. Honor Sachs combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging narrative to examine how conditions in Kentucky facilitated the expansion of rights for white men in ways that would become a model for citizenship in the country as a whole. Endorsed by many prominent western historians, this groundbreaking work is a major contribution to frontier scholarship.

Honor Sachsis assistant professor of history at University of Colorado Boulder.

“Honor Sachs demonstrates conclusively that understanding the early American frontier requires taking women and their families seriously. Her sophisticated questions, admirable research, engaging writing, and powerful argument make for compelling history.”—John Mack Faragher, author ofDaniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer

“Too many politicians and pundits today look longingly back to a golden age of the family, as a guide to imagining the nation’s future. Honor Sachs’s elegantly wrought study of the discords and detriments of domesticity on the Kentucky frontier should make them pause in their reveries. Sachs brilliantly counts the cost of ‘free land’ for white men in the miseries wrought on women, enslaved people, orphans and the poor. This is American history at its most eye-opening.”—Virginia Scharff, author ofThe Women Jefferson Loved

“Putting households at the center of life in Kentucky, Honor Sachs offers fresh perspectives on poverty, land speculation, and violence as well as on conceptions of masculinity and citizenship in the Early Republic.Homel¶