Peaceable kingdom lost: The Paxton Boys and the destruction of William Penn's holy experiment

by Kevin Kenny

Paperback, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

QH KEN

Publication

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

ISBN

9781616641832

Description

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a ""holy experiment"" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violenc

User reviews

LibraryThing member bness2
Excellent book covering a part of American history I had previously known little about. Fascinating period of history just on the eve of the Revolutionary War. It's also a very sad story, as it shows the roots of the American genocide of Native Americans.
LibraryThing member Shrike58
For much of this book I'll admit that I was not all that impressed, due to a familiarity with the author's main secondary sources (it read too much like a bland rehash), but this monograph really comes into its own when dealing with the period between Pontiac's War and the American Revolution, when
Show More
the Ulster Irish frontiersmen called the Paxton Boys were a catalyst for chaos. First by murdering the last of the Conestoga tribe and demonstrating just what the authority of the Pennsylvania colonial government was worth, and then further rubbing in this lack of effective authority by helping the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut appropriate a large chunk of the Wyoming Valley. That a small band of self-serving thugs could have such a disproportionate influence is a commentary on how fractious Pennsylvania politics were and also illustrates that, in the end, there is no such thing as polite colonialism; frankly, William Penn's "holy experiment" was probably doomed from the start as a naive fiction. No one comes out of this chunk of history looking especially good; desperation will do that though I suppose.
Show Less

Call number

QH KEN

Barcode

6171
Page: 0.4529 seconds