I just got an alert that the University of Pennsylvania Press‘s Spring 2010 catalog is out. There is a lot of good stuff in it, but there were two books that fell into the “I can’t wait to read that” category:
I have been waiting for some time now for the appearance of John Smolenski’s Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania. It will be out in May. Back in my days as a McNeil Center fellow I remember several conversations with John about this project. I am eager to see some of the directions he has gone with it. Here is the Penn Press blurb:
In its early years, William Penn’s “Peaceable Kingdom” was anything
but. Pennsylvania’s governing institutions were faced with daunting
challenges: Native Americans proved far less docile than Penn had
hoped, the colony’s non-English settlers were loathe to accept Quaker
authority, and the Friends themselves were divided by grievous
factional struggles. Yet out of this chaos emerged a colony hailed by
contemporary and modern observers alike as the most liberal, tolerant,
and harmonious in British America.
In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski argues that Pennsylvania’s
early history can best be understood through the lens of creolization—
the process by which Old World habits, values, and practices were
transformed in a New World setting. Unable simply to transplant
English political and legal traditions across the Atlantic, Quaker
leaders gradually forged a creole civic culture that secured Quaker
authority in an increasingly diverse colony. By mythologizing the
colony’s early settlement and casting Friends as the ideal guardians of
its uniquely free and peaceful society, they succeeded in establishing
a shared civic culture in which Quaker dominance seemed natural
and just.
The first history of Pennsylvania’s founding in more than forty years,
Friends and Strangers offers a provocative new look at the transfer
of English culture to North America. Setting Pennsylvania in the
context of the broader Atlantic phenomenon of creolization,
Smolenski’s account of the Quaker colony’s origins reveals the vital
role this process played in creating early American society.
The other book is Judith Ridner’s A Town in-Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Early Mid-Atlantic Interior. It will also appear in May. Since moving to south-central Pennsylvania eight years ago, I have begun to develop a real interest in Pennsylvania history. A while ago I read Ridner’s dissertation on Carlisle, so I am eager to see how she has moved from dissertation to book. I know many of my students who intern at the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle will also be interested in this work. I hope it comes out in paperback soon so that I can assign it! Here is the Penn Press blurb:
In A Town In-Between, Judith Ridner reveals the influential, turbulent
past of a modest, quiet American community. Today Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, nestled in the Susquehanna Valley, is far from the
nation’s political and financial centers. In the eighteenth century,
however, Carlisle and its residents stood not only at a geographical
crossroads but also at the fulcrum of early American controversies.
Located between East Coast settlement and the western frontier,
Carlisle quickly became a mid-Atlantic hub, serving as a migration
gateway to the southern and western interiors, a commercial way station
in the colonial fur trade, a military staging and supply ground
during the Seven Years’ War, American Revolution, and Whiskey
Rebellion, and home to one of the first colleges in the United States,
Dickinson.
A Town In-Between reconsiders the role early American towns and
townspeople played in the development of the country’s interior.
Focusing on the lives of the ambitious group of Scots-Irish colonists
who built Carlisle, Judith Ridner reasserts that the early American
west was won by traders, merchants, artisans, and laborers—many of
them Irish immigrants—and not just farmers. Founded by proprietor
Thomas Penn, the rapidly growing town was the site of repeated
uprisings, jailbreaks, and one of the most publicized Anti-Federalist
riots during constitutional ratification. These conflicts had dramatic
consequences for many Scots-Irish Presbyterian residents who found
themselves a people in-between, mediating among the competing
ethnoreligious, cultural, class, and political interests that separated
them from their fellow Quaker and Anglican colonists of the Delaware
Valley and their myriad Native American trading partners of the
Ohio country.
In this thoroughly researched and highly readable study, Ridner
argues that interior towns were not so much spearheads of a progressive
and westward-moving Euro-American civilization, but volatile places
situated in the middle of a culturally diverse, economically dynamic,
and politically evolving early America.
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