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Troubled Experiment exposes the difference between glowing reputation and grim reality of crime in early Pennsylvania. The plight of lawmakers and magistrates, and the sufferings of victims, women, children, and minorities take their places in this tragedy. The authors conclude that through this lens, we see the troubled future of America.
Winner of the 2024 McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” reta...
Here is a concise overview of the historical development and judicial interpretation of the First Amendment religion clauses. It begins with a survey of the history of American religious liberty, goes on to present the views of the Founding Fathers, and then considers the core value of religious liberty and the constitutional purposes that implement that value. the book ends on a practical note by applying these principles to questions of equal access, religious symbolism in public life, and the task of defining religion for constitutional purposes. As the authors note in their introduction, "the historical principles that animate the religion clauses are more than an abstract intellectual exercise. . . . They provide an essential context for guiding the resolution of modern religious liberty issues."
This is a major reinterpretation of John Bunyan, each of whose works, including the posthumous, is analyzed in its immediate historical context. The author draws on recent literature on depression to demonstrate that Bunyan suffered from this mood disorder as a young man and then used this experience to help mold his literary works.
"William Penn played a crucial role in the emergence of religious liberty and remains a singular, if often overlooked, figure in the history of liberty of conscience. Penn's political thought provides a window into the tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, Penn experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theory and practice as proprietor of a major American colony. A careful examination of Penn's political thought points scholars toward a new way of understanding the enterprise of political theory itself"--
The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man-a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.
The Restoration, which re-established Charles II as king of England in 1660, marked the end of "God's cause"-a struggle for liberty and republican freedom. While most accounts of this period concentrate on the court, Christopher Hill focuses on those who mourned the passing of the most radical era in English history. The radical protestant clergy, as well as republican intellectuals and writers generally, had to explain why providence had forsaken the agents of God's work. In The Experience of Defeat, Christopher Hill explores the writings and lives of the Levellers, the Ranters and the Diggers, as well as the work of George Fox and other important early Quakers. Some of them were pursued by the new regime, forced into hiding or exile; others compelled to recant. In particular Hill examines John Milton's late work, arguing that it came directly out of a painful reassessment of man and society that impelled him to "justify the ways of God to Man."
In its early years, William Penn's "Peaceable Kingdom" was anything but. Pennsylvania's governing institutions were faced with daunting challenges: Native Americans proved far less docile than Penn had hoped, the colony's non-English settlers were loath to accept Quaker authority, and Friends themselves were divided by grievous factional struggles. Yet out of this chaos emerged a colony hailed by contemporary and modern observers alike as the most liberal, tolerant, and harmonious in British America. In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski argues that Pennsylvania's early history can best be understood through the lens of creolization—the process by which Old World habits, values, and pra...