I am originally from Kansas City, Missouri. During middle and high school, I volunteered at the Clay County Museum and Historical Society. When designing exhibits, planning public events, and organizing artifacts, I confronted important questions about making history accessible to the public: in a limited space, how do we decide what history to share? How can we challenge audiences to engage with primary sources? And what is the best way to showcase contested histories?
     I confronted similar questions in my own independent research. After reading that some women travelled with the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, I wanted to learn more: what were these army women’s daily lives like before the war? How did the war change their social networks, parenting, and labor? And how did the women’s military service impact their post-war lives? Secondary sources did not reveal answers, so I dove into pension files, microfilm of Virginia’s Council of State Papers, and cemetery records. These sources revealed that they sometimes went on strike for pay, harbored fugitive enslaved women, joined forces with enlisted men to demand rations, and reported mutiny plans to officers—in two instances, causing them to hang soldiers. After the war, women demanded pay and pensions. This discovery only raised more questions: why do finding aids and indexes fail to list these women? And if army women left such visible marks on military records, with many bolstering their pension applications with compelling testimony, why do historians neglect them? What accounts for this historiographic silence?