Jean R. Soderlund

Catherine S. Parzynski

American historians have emphasized major cities as cultural and economic centers. This volume explores the vitality of cultural, economic, and political life beyond those cities. The Lehigh Valley is a place where integral events occurred, but is also an example of regional growth outside large cities. Its unique location, close enough to New York and Philadelphia to market grain, iron, coal, and steel, yet distant enough to develop its own cultural life, offers a regional model persisting for more than two centuries heretofore unexplored in American historical scholarship. This persistence of cultural and economic patterns, including the capacity to change, makes Lehigh Valley history particularly intriguing.

The Lehigh Valley from Settlement to Steel

Backcountry Crucibles

Defending the Lenape homeland -- Seeking peace in Cohanzick County -- Protecting liberty and property : the West New Jersey concessions -- Quaker colonization without violence or remorse -- Women, ethnicity, and freedom in southern Lenapehoking -- Forced separation : enslaved blacks in the Quaker colony -- A different path : defining Swedish and Finnish ethnicity.

Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey

Separate Paths

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” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.

David M. Oshinsky

Edward L. Ayers

Lewis L. Gould

Written by top scholars of American History, AMERICAN PASSAGES, BRIEF SECOND EDITION examines U.S. history the way people live?in the flow of real time. Rather than pursuing one topic (such as politics, culture, society, reform, the military, or economics) at a time, each chapter of the text interweaves important themes and issues into one clear narrative. Through this method of presentation as well as through the primary source material in every chapter, students can observe the many ways that events, movements, and groups of people have served to shape history and can learn to make connections between these themes and issues. This revision includes expanded review materials and pedagogy to help students get through the course as well as a free AMERICAN PASSAGES Book Companion Website created by Ed Ayers. This site includes chapter-by-chapter quizzing, interactive maps, videos, audio, and links to over 400 readings.

A History of the United States, Volume I: to 1877, Brief

American Passages

Written by top scholars of American History, AMERICAN PASSAGES, BRIEF SECOND EDITION examines U.S. history the way people live--in the flow of real time. Rather than pursuing one topic (such as politics, culture, society, reform, the military, or economics) at a time, each chapter of the text interweaves important themes and issues into one clear narrative. Through this method of presentation as well as through the primary source material in every chapter, students can observe the many ways that events, movements, and groups of people have served to shape history and can learn to make connections between these themes and issues. This revision includes expanded review materials and pedagogy to help students get through the course as well as a free AMERICAN PASSAGES Book Companion Website created by Ed Ayers. This site includes chapter-by-chapter quizzing, interactive maps, videos, audio, and links to over 400 readings.

Jean R. Soderlund

Books

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