The Homefront as America’s Unseen Campaign
“What is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always present.”— Samuel Johnson (1755)
The U.S. military has always depended on two things: the people who wore the uniform — and the people who made it possible to wear it.
This is the history of the second group.
Jump right in — history waits for no one.
Homefront Archives: Behind the Uniform
~The Homefront as America’s Unseen Campaign~
In 1780, Martha Bratton burned down her own house rather than let British forces seize the gunpowder stored inside. When asked who had done it, she said: "It was I who did it."
Her name almost didn't make it into the history books.
That's the problem this project exists to fix.
Homefront Archives explores the home front as its own theater within the broader military system — from the camp followers at Valley Forge to the military wives who pressured Congress during the Vietnam War to modern spouses navigating year-long deployments while building the family readiness infrastructure the military now runs on.
The form and visibility of these roles changed across every era.
The necessity didn't.
This isn't a military lifestyle project.
It's history — grounded in archival records, primary sources, and two and a half centuries of paper trails that show spouses not as background figures, but as institutional actors.
