Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania

Product Description Two powerfully contradictory images dominate historical memory when we think of Native Americans and colonists in early Pennsylvania. To one side is William Penn’s legendary treaty with the Lenape at Shackamaxon in 1682, enshrined in Edward Hicks’s allegories of the “Peaceable Kingdom.” To the other is the Paxton Boys’ cold-blooded slaughter of twenty Conestoga men, women, and children in 1763. How relations between Pennsylvanians and their Native neighbors deteriorated, in only 80 years, from the idealism of Shackamaxon to the bloodthirstiness of Conestoga is the central theme of Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods. William Pencak and Daniel Richter have assembled some of the most talented young historians working in the field today. Their approaches and subject matter vary greatly, but all concentrate less on the mundane details of how Euro- and Indian Pennsylvanians negotiated and fought than on how people constructed and reconstructed their cultures in dialogue with others. Taken together, the essays trace the collapse of whatever potential may have existed for a Pennsylvania shared by Indians and Europeans. What remained was a racialized definition that left no room for Native people, except in reassuring memories of the justice of the Founder. Pennsylvania came to be a landscape utterly dominated by Euro-Americans, who managed to turn the region’s history not only into a story solely about themselves but a morality tale about their best (William Penn) and worst (Paxton Boys) sides. The construction of Pennsylvania on Native ground was also the construction of a racial order for the new nation. Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods will find a broad audience among scholars of early American history, Native American history, and race relations. Review “ Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods is a well-conceived series of essays that together treat the themes of coexistence and racial conflict. And they do so with great sensitivity to change. The essays reveal, in vivid detail, ordinary as well as great individuals grappling with these great problems. But, perhaps because they are written by both some of the most established scholars in the field and new, rising talent, the essays are not in complete harmony with one another, they do not tell a single, seamless story. Instead, this is a book in which many sparks fly.” —Gregory E. Dowd, University of Michigan“This is an excellent collection of essays whose authors, a combination of seasoned scholars and neophytes, make a special effort to speak to one another. This gives the book more cohesion than one usually finds in anthologies. I highly recommend it to professional historians and advance studies of Native American and colonial history.” —Sherry L. Smith, History“Gathering together some of the best and most recent scholarship on eighteenth-century race and cultural encounters, Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods is a testament to the dynamic state of early Pennsylvania history. Indeed, a plethora of submissions to a regional journal gave editors William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter the raw material to shape this volume around the work of thirteen historians, many of whom were nurtured in the academic community that thrives in the mid-Atlantic. This volume, then, is also a tribute to the stimulating scholarly discussions generated at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the rich archival sources found in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and other area repositories.” —Jane T. Merritt, William and Mary Quarterly“As with most collections, the essays here vary in depth and quality, but compared to other collections, this one holds together especially well. Organized chronologically and dealing so closely with the same region and problems, the book situates the dark side of Pennsylvania’s history in an easy-to-follow narrative, with richness of detail and, remarkably, with little to no redundancy.” —Nancy