William A. Pencak – författare

This book moves the story of Pennsylvania's pivotal role in the American Revolution beyond familiar Philadelphia into the rural areas to the north and west. It covers not only the city’s surrounding counties of Bucks and Chester but also the interior areas of the Lehigh, Schuylkill, Susquehanna, and Juniata River valleys. What was the ethnic, religious, and political makeup of Pennsylvania on the eve of revolt? Who supported the Revolution and who opposed it? What role did Native Americans play? Did the Revolution produce social, political, and economic change? The nine essays in Beyond Philadelphia represent the current state of our knowledge on how most Pennsylvanians experienced the Revolution. The Introduction and Afterword set the essays in the context of early Pennsylvania history and the course of the American Revolution in other states. From these essays, we can see three patterns of Revolution in Pennsylvania. The oldest counties near Philadelphia gave little support, had large numbers of neutral Quakers and active Loyalists, and endured sporadic partisan warfare. The central region of the state supported the Revolution almost unanimously. It contributed mightily to the Continental Army in men and production of the sinews of war. On the frontiers, brutal guerrilla warfare involving Indians and rival white claimants for land began before the Revolution and continued after it ended, resulting in economic devastation. Here, the Revolution was but an episode in a local struggle for survival. Beyond Philadelphia will interest all readers who seek a better understanding of how the American Revolution was experienced throughout Pennsylvania. Contributors are Tim H. Blessing, Robert G. Crist, Paul E. Doutrich, John B. Frantz, Karen Guenther, Owen S. Ireland, Gregory T. Knouff, William Pencak, Eugene R. Slaski, Frederick J. Stefon, and Rosemary S. Warden.

Riot and revelry have been mainstays of English and European history writing for more than a generation, but they have had a more checkered influence on American scholarship. Despite considerable attention from "new left" historians during the 1970s and early 1980s, and more recently from cultural and "public sphere" historians in the mid-1990s, the idea of America as a colony and nation deeply infused with a culture of public performance has not been widely demonstrated the way it has been in Britain, France, and Italy. In this important volume, leading American historians demonstrate that early America was in fact an integral part of a broader transatlantic tradition of popular disturbance and celebration. The first half of the collection focuses on "rough music" and "skimmington"—forms of protest whereby communities publicly regulated the moral order. The second half considers the use of parades and public celebrations to create national unity and overcome divisions in the young republic. Contributors include Roger D. Abrahams, Susan Branson, Thomas J. Humphrey, Susan E. Klepp, Brendan McConville, William D. Piersen, Steven J. Stewart, and Len Travers. Together the essays in this volume offer the best introduction to the full range of protest and celebration in America from the Revolution to the Civil War.

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.

Pennsylvania’s Revolution embodies a new era of scholarship about the state’s Revolutionary past. It breaks from a narrowly focused study of Philadelphia and the 1776 Constitution to evaluate Pennsylvania’s internal conflicts during the Revolutionary period. Pronounced struggles between Pennsylvania’s own citizen factions during the late eighteenth century are often cited by historians to demonstrate how this trend produced important social and political changes throughout the American colonies. By examining these experiences from multiple angles, this book reflects the overarching themes of the Revolution through a detailed study of Pennsylvania—the most radical of the thirteen colonies. In this volume, William Pencak brings together fifteen essays that expand our knowledge of the complex changes that occurred in Pennsylvania during this tumultuous era. Acting as a companion to John Frantz and William Pencak’s regionally focused 1998 volume Beyond Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Revolution takes a topical approach to the discussion of the state’s internal turmoil. Through the lens of political and military history along with social history, women’s history, ethnohistory, Native American studies, urban history, cultural history, material culture, religious history, print culture, frontier/backcountry studies, and even film studies and theater history, this volume gives readers a glimpse of the diverse nature of contemporary and future historiography of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary period.

For many people, Pennsylvania's contribution to the Civil War goes little beyond the battle of Gettysburg. The North in general has received far less attention than the Confederacy in the historiography of the Civil War—a weakness in the literature that this book will help address. The essays in this volume reconsider the impact of the Civil War on Pennsylvania and the way its memory remains alive even today.Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War contains a wealth of new information about Pennsylvania during the war years. For instance, perhaps as many as 2,000 Pennsylvanians defected to the Confederacy to fight for the Southern cause. And during the advance of Lee's army in 1863, residents of the Gettysburg area gained a reputation throughout North and South as a stingy people who wanted to make money from the war rather than sacrifice for the Union. But the state displayed loyalty as well and commitment to the cause of freedom. Pittsburgh served as the site for one of the first public monuments in the country dedicated to African Americans. Women of the Commonwealth also contributed mightily through organizing sanitary fairs or helping in ways that belied their roles as keepers of the domestic world. And readers will learn from an African American soldier's letters how blacks helped win their own liberation.As a whole, the ten essays contained in Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War include courage on the battlefield but reflect the current trends to understand the motivations of soldiers and the impact of war on civilians, rather than focusing solely on battles or leadership. The essays also employ interdisciplinary techniques, as well as raise gender and racial questions. They incorporate a more expansive time frame than the four years of the conflict, by looking at not only the making of the war—but also its remaking—or how a public revisits the past to suit contemporary needs.