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Chapman, Sam J.

This thesis explores the evolving narratives of three non-elite women—Deborah Sampson, Elizabeth Freeman, and Nancy Ward—who lived during and participated in the American Revolution, illustrating the impact of mythologization on historical memory and national identity. By comparing and contrasting the historical narratives of each woman using only the limited archival material available with authoritative secondary source accounts spanning the first two centuries after the Revolution, this study reveals how historians have altered, omitted, or exaggerated aspects of these women’s stories. These alterations can reveal much about what kind of female narratives were considered historically significant or socially useful at the time any particular account was written. The research examines the contrasting treatment of these three women’s stories by historians. Sampson, Freeman, and Ward emerge as exemplary figures of United States national identity in different ways, at different times, and for different reasons.

Text

University of British Columbia. HIST 499

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0441992

Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan); History and Sociology, Department of (Okanagan)

Undergraduate

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