Friends and Strangers

John Smolenski is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is coeditor, with Thomas J. Humphrey, of New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"An excellent retelling of the political history of an extraordinary colonial experiment. . . . Focusing on creolization allows Smolenski to root Pennsylvania politics in Quaker culture while also providing the basis for useful comparisons with the experiences of other charter groups in the colonial Atlantic."-Journal of American History"John Smolenski's refreshing Friends and Strangers gives us a Pennsylvania all the more vibrant for being made in America. Here, real Quakers, unsure and often disputatious, grappled with each other and with Indians to shape the unexpectedly creole colony Pennsylvania had become by 1720, usually against William Penn's wishes. Smolenski's Pennsylvania is far more interesting, notably more American, and even more compelling than Edward Hick's idealized 'Peaceable Kingdom' paintings of the 1830s ever conveyed. Friends and Strangers brings a wonderful realism to early Pennsylvania's surprisingly bumptious history."-Jon Butler, Yale University"In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski balances the need for a fresh narrative of early Pennsylvania with a subtle analysis of the emergence of a 'creole culture.' His book forces us to think both about the parallel experiences of Anglo- and Latin America, and about white and black encounters, while also setting the stage for a reconsideration of the classic question of 'Americanization.'"-John L. Brooke, author of The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844