Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America

Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early AmericaRelying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew until, with the arrival of the Seven Years' War, thousands of country people were forced to

Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew--until, with the arrival of the Seven Years' War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack.Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to violence. He shows how it was only through the shared experience of fearing and hating Indians that these Europeans, once irreconcilable, were finally united under the ideal of religious and ethnic tolerance that has since defined the best in American life.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 08/01/2009
ISBN: 9780393334906
Pages: 432
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 8.18h x 5.44w x 1.11d