Friends & Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania

Edited by William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter
5.875” x 9”, 336 pgs.
The essays in this book explain in vivid detail how the relations between Pennsylvanians and their Native neighbors deteriorated in only eighty years, from the idealism of founder William Penn’s treaty with the Lenape at Shackamaxon in 1682 to the bloodthirsty slaughter of twenty Conestoga men, women, and children in 1763. It is also a sensitive story of coexistence and conflict, which resulted in the construction of a racial order for the new nation.