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 loath to accept Quaker authority, and 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.

New World Orders Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas Edited by John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey "Fascinating case studies of how authority was both brutal yet precarious and malleable in the French, Spanish, English, and Dutch empires of the New World."--"American Historical Review" "This is an almost ideal anthology for graduate students and scholars still weighing the value of Atlantic-world scholarship. The essays are consistently strong and jargon-free. Editors and authors have produced a crisp, coherent, and readable volume whose case studies and arguments should stimulate discussion on the merits of the connecting themes rather than suffer cannibalization by specialists perusing only contributions from a particular geographic region."--"Hispanic American Historical Review" "This wide-ranging collection . . . offers a] compelling framework to connect the small triumphs and tragedies of daily life in colonial outposts with the grand plans of distant empire builders."--"Journal of the Early Republic" As the geographic boundaries of early American history have expanded, so too have historians' attempts to explore the comparative dimensions of this history. At the same time, historians have struggled to find a conceptual framework flexible enough to incorporate the sweeping narratives of imperial history and the hidden narratives of social history into a broader, synthetic whole. No such paradigm that captures the two perspectives has yet emerged. "New World Orders" addresses these broad conceptual issues by reexamining the relationships among violence, sanction, and authority in the early modern Americas. More specifically, the essays in this volume explore the wide variety of legal and extralegal means--from state-sponsored executions to unsanctioned crowd actions--by which social order was maintained, with a particular emphasis on how extralegal sanctions were defined and used; how such sanctions related to legal forms of maintaining order; and how these patterns of sanction, embedded within other forms of colonialism and culture, created cultural, legal, social, or imperial spaces in the early Americas. With essays written by senior and junior scholars on the British, Spanish, Dutch, and French colonies, "New World Orders" presents one of the most comprehensive looks at the sweep of colonization in the Atlantic world. By juxtaposing case studies from Brazil, Venezuela, New York, California, Saint Domingue, and Louisiana with treatments of broader trends in Anglo-America or Spanish America more generally, the volume demonstrates the need to examine the questions of violence, sanction, and authority in hemispheric perspective. John Smolenski teaches history at the University of California, Davis. Thomas J. Humphrey is Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University and author of "Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution." Early American Studies 2005 376 pages 6 x 9 6 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3895-2 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1922-7 Paper $26.50s 17.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-9000-4 Ebook $26.50s 17.50 World Rights American History Short copy: "New World Orders" juxtaposes case studies from Brazil to California to New York to explore the wide variety of legal and extralegal means by which social order was maintained in the early Americas.