Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania by John Smolenski

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Doug MacGregor

Abstract

Pennsylvanians have prided themselves on the story of their founding almost since the founding itself. The story of William Penn's great experiment of religious freedom and harmonious relations with the native inhabitants is an often-told tale, recognizable by many, from grade schools to the ivory towers, and immortalized in paintings from the eighteenth century to videogames in the twenty-first. But is our creation story just that, a story, steeped in myth just as the wolf-raised Romulus? In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski finds that, "in its first decades" Pennsylvania was anything but the "'peaceable kingdom' of myth and legend" and seeks to separate fact from myth.

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Book Reviews