CURRENT PROJECT
“A Colonizing Peace: The Struggle for Harmony in Early America” (book manuscript)
A Colonizing Peace encourages historians to see peace as a process of "right ordering.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, peace was both a language and a set of practices early Americans hoped would produce harmony for themselves, and possibly others. In the Delaware and Susquehanna Valleys — in what came to be known as “Pennsylvania” — Euroamericans and Native peoples negotiated violence through their particular understandings of peace. Often, one group’s understanding of “right ordering” produced violent outcomes for others. I center my narrative by asking what peace meant for whom and how the quest for peace both enabled and regulated violence on the colonial frontier. The Quaker peace, I argue, perpetuated colonization and slavery, even as Friends struggled to rid themselves of moral and spiritual corruptions, which they saw as the root cause of violence. The Lenape, by contrast, utilized peace discourse to push back against colonization and preserve their autonomy, while maintaining relations with colonial allies and trading partners.
Examining these histories through the lens of peace enables us to see connections that otherwise would be veiled. For instance, situating Indian complaints about the colonial alcohol trade as a peace problem reveals the relationship between indigenous diplomacy and consumption. The Quakers’ attempts to engage in household and bodily regulation — a type of peace discourse I call “gospel order” — was the means by which they debated slavery as a moral issue. Quaker peace practices, I argue, blunted antislavery critiques in Quaker meetings, but it also fueled abolitionist dissent. My project helps us better understand how violence regulation maintained the “long peace” before 1754, and how indigenous and colonial peace discourses unraveled during and after the Seven Years’ War.
Related work:
“‘Rancontyn Marenit’: Lenape Peacemaking before William Penn,” in The Worlds of William Penn, eds. Andrew Murphy and John Smolenski (Rutgers University Press, 2019), 217-31
"Dangerous Spirits How the Indian Critique of Alcohol Shaped Eighteenth-Century Quaker Revivalism" Early American Studies (Spring 2016): 258-83
"Rethinking Slavery on the Pennsylvania Frontier" (Video) Region and Nation in American Histories of Race and Slavery, OIEAHC conference, Mount Vernon, 2016
RECENT PROJECT
The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic, eds. Michael Goode and John Smolenski (Brill, 2018)
The Specter of Peace highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. The volume originated as a conference I co-organized in 2015 with John Smolenski, associate professor of history, University of California, Davis.
Our contention is that historians underappreciate the importance of peace to understanding how colonial Americans confronted violence as a moral problem; how ideologies of peace informed popular and political debates about violence, warfare, and colonialism; and how peace was woven through the myriad interactions between and among settlers, Native Americans, and people of African descent. Dr. Wayne Lee, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, contributed a foreword.
You can hear me discuss The Specter of Peace in episode 2, season 1 of the Talking in the Library podcast, hosted by Library Company of Philadelphia.