| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.3

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania. Edited by William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. xiv, 336p. Illustration, notes, index, notes on contributors. Cloth, $65; paper, $22.95.)

Every now and again—but all too rarely—a collection of essays appears that lives up to its title. The editors of Friends and Enemies in Penn's Wood, William Pencak and Daniel Richter, have produced such a book. Friends and Enemies explores the ways in which neither conflict nor cooperation defined Pennsylvania's frontier during the eighteenth century. In the introduction, Pencak and Richter argue that the key to understanding "Penn's Woods" lies not in striking a balance between these two poles but in looking for the murky truth somewhere between them, in the cultural space between the middle ground and conquest. They and the authors move back and forth between "powerfully contradictory images" of "harmonious coexistence" and racialized "nightmare" (p. ix). Pennsylvania, they believe, represented both and neither. In a brilliant afterword to this fascinating volume, James Merrell agrees, suggesting that perhaps historians have ignored colonial Pennsylvania in general and its frontier in particular for this reason. As he argues, the fluidity of the eighteenth-century intercultural experience in Pennsylvania makes any defining processes difficult, yet intriguing, to pin down.

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