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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...
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"As the Oracles of God" examines how Quakers in colonial America sought to control both the written and spoken word in their religious communities. It looks at the ways in which American Friends set up committees to censor texts deemed heterodox, as well as the ways Quakers sought to moderate the words of believers through encouraging self-censorship as a way to access personal revelation, while also paying particular attention to the experiences of those who ran afoul of Friends' rules in these regards, either by publishing works without the consent of their meetings or speaking in un-Quakerly fashion. Debates over freedom of speech, the work asserts, defined early modern religious communities just as much as it did more formal legal institutions.