The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic. By Richard Godbeer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xiv, 254 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9120-5.)

Abstract

Richard Godbeer's evocative narrative format allows the reader to enter a lost world of sentiment and even physical affection between men. Godbeer complicates, as others have before him, the modern binaries of sexuality, but he also argues that male friendship provides a new way of seeing familiar faces and analyzing familiar events of colonial British North American history in the eighteenth century. One of the most important additions to the literature on male friendships that Godbeer makes is his subtle analysis of the physical nature of these bonds between men. He reminds us that people, even strangers, shared beds during this period. Cold weather or a lack of alternatives partially explained such tight quarters. Godbeer claims, however, that a shared bed between friends, and the embraces, and even kisses they exchanged were a normal part of male friendship. If sexuality was part of the equation, little of the record has survived to chart this reality. Nonetheless, it is clear that these men loved one another and could express their love both privately and publicly.