Margaret Corbin was a hero of the American Revolution, the wife of an artilleryman killed at Fort Washington in New York who took over his gun to fight the British. Grievously wounded, she became the first woman to receive a US military pension. In 1926, 150 years after the battle, her supposed remains were exhumed in Highland Falls, up the Hudson from Manhattan, and buried at the US Military Academy.

“There was so much energy and wonderful intention behind doing this,” said Denise Kiernan, of what remains the only monument to a woman at West Point. “And then in 2016 they took a look and said, ‘Oh wait a minute, not only are the bones not hers, they’re not the bones of a woman.’”

Now it’s 2026, the 250th anniversary of the country’s birth. In Kiernan’s new book, Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution, Corbin is just one character the bestselling author of The Girls of Atomic City and The Last Castle presents afresh to the reader.

“Margaret Corbin and a lot of other folks, you know about them because of pensions, or petitions to governments for some form of redress, or money, or something like that,” Kiernan said. “Because otherwise either the stories weren’t taken down at the time, or the people involved – women, enslaved folks, Indigenous people – weren’t necessarily encouraged to leave their own record behind.”

One who did was Elizabeth Drinker from Philadelphia, who kept a diary that “runs to three volumes, thousands of pages, and it’s an incredible record of life, and also life for Quakers, which was no picnic, and that’s important when you’re talking about a country that was founded on religious freedom. They weren’t experiencing it that way, for sure.”

Drinker’s story runs from the mundane – if not that mundane, given that Betsy Ross, semi-legendary designer of the first American flag, did her upholstery – to the dramatic. One day in April 1778, Drinker and three friends set out for Valley Forge, where George Washington wintered his army. The women aimed to petition the American commander to release their husbands, banished to Virginia for refusing to pledge allegiance to colonial forces.

Kiernan wonders at what Drinker “had to go through. You’re just trying to keep your business running, and your husband gets arrested and taken away, and you don’t know where. That’s horrible.” She “tried to write the story from Drinker’s perspective, which is, ‘I want to get my husband out of here, I’m going to get these women together, we’re going to Valley Forge. Oh, we get asked in by Mrs Washington, we have a meal.’ It makes it feel more personal that way.”

Other subjects include Nanye’hi or Nancy Ward, a Cherokee leader who navigated shifting loyalties; Elizabeth Freeman or “Mumbet”, enslaved in Massachusetts until she sued for freedom and won; and Deborah Sampson, who passed as a man to fight.

Few left clear trails. Kiernan worked from letters, household accounts and official documents, but often found herself writing in gaps in the record.

“Sometimes you get very lucky,” she said, “but sometimes you get very frustrated, because there aren’t any gaps you can fill in. Lorenda was one of the luckier things that I came across.”

Lorenda Holmes was a loyalist spy in New York.

“It’s never just the us-versus-them, hero-versus-villain version, ever,” Kiernan said. “Lorenda Holmes, who I find fascinating, here she was in the colonies but her loyalties were clearly to the crown. It could have been friends she cared about, it could have been, who knows. But I did want you to look at someone like her, risking a lot to act as a courier and ferry post back and forth from friends of the crown to others, and feel for the risks everyday people took all the time – maybe not as risky as her, because the outcome of this mattered.

“If you were Native American, boy, was that tricky. Do we side with the British? Do we side with the Americans? How is this going to help us try and maintain some semblance of this life we’ve had on this land for thousands of years? Those were very, very difficult choices. The Native Americans had been experiencing so much before our war even started.

“So the idea of choice and consequences is something I always try to keep in mind.”

Obstinate Daughters was eight years in the making: “as long as the Revolution,” Kiernan said with a laugh. That meant she was in the last stages of writing when Donald Trump returned to power and set his minions loose on history itself, seeking to write the underserved back out. At Valley Forge, Kiernan found in the National Park Service’s work “an incredibly inclusive focus on the stories of the camp followers, because there were so many, a focus on the stories of Black soldiers, a focus on story of Polly Cooper and the Oneida,” Cooper a cook who helped feed Washington’s men, her tribe “America’s first ally”. Trump’s war on history hasn’t yet reached Valley Forge but it did reach the site of the President’s House in Philadelphia, where boards centering the role of slavery were removed then ordered back by a judge.

You can’t erase history. It fades but it’s there all the time. I finished reading Obstinate Daughters on a weekend in New York. Kiernan lives in Asheville, North Carolina, a state that saw plenty of fighting. She went north too, interspersing history with travelogue, tracing routes her characters followed. In Manhattan, in Bowling Green park near Wall Street, I found myself reading Kiernan’s account of 9 July 1776, when patriots pulled down the statue that stood there. King George III was melted for bullets. The railings that surrounded the statue remain.

Later, I stood with a crowd gathered in Bennett Park, in Washington Heights, to watch the Knicks win the NBA championship on screens rigged up for the night. In 1776, Bennett Park was Fort Washington. Margaret Corbin manned her husband’s gun and was wounded and captured where my children played.

The next day, on the Turnpike back to DC, a rest stop was called Molly Pitcher. The subject of a famous 19th-century painting, the origin of the legend of Molly Pitcher could be Corbin, or it could be Mary Ludwig Hayes, who fought at the Battle of Monmouth, in New Jersey in 1778.

“Both their husbands were artillery from Pennsylvania,” Kiernan said. “We have these stories because we want to fill in these gaps, and we know from 1776 on, there were women fighting. It wasn’t just those two people. The Molly picture shows the power of the image. That painting had a huge impact on how we remembered women in the revolutionary war. For all we know Molly Pitcher really was somebody out on the battlefield. You’re waiting for that one letter to turn up, that one reference, so you’re like, ‘Oh my god, there’s the answer.”

On the page, considering her Obstinate Daughters, Kiernan provides another.

“It’s almost a case of who wasn’t Molly Pitcher,” she writes.

• Obstinate Daughters is out now