Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods is a well-conceived series of essays that together treat the themes of coexistence and racial conflict. The essays in this volume trace the collapse of whatever potential may have existed for 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.

William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter
ISBN 0-271-02385-6
Soft cover