My dissertation looks at food diplomacy and food hostility during and after the American Revolution. I’m thinking about how Indians, free blacks, and slaves spoke through food, how those foodways helped and hurt the British and American efforts in the battle for Independence, and how conflicted relationships that centered on food continued to affect the new nation, Indian-white relations in the North and South, and the black loyalist diaspora in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone after the war ended. Food offered different peoples in the Revolutionary age opportunities to assert group identity, strategize militarily, and create shared histories. Yet hunger also led to outbreaks of violence. Consequently the significance of Native American and African foodways in the everyday American diet, practical battles over food distribution between Britons, Americans, and Indians, and uses of food as a symbolic mode of communication all affected how the Revolution played out.