CURRENT PROJECT
“A Colonizing Peace: The Struggle for Harmony in Early America” (book manuscript in progress)
A Colonizing Peace encourages historians to see peace as a process of "right ordering" that shaped how Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and people of African descent negotiated violence and ordered their families and households. 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. A key part of my book examines how indigenous peacemaking and slavery shaped Quaker reform and abolitionism in the mid-eighteenth century, before the advent of modern humanitarianism.
In early Pennsylvania, Quakers utilized what they called “gospel order” to mediate their relationship to slavery, imperial warfare, and colonization. Gospel order was both a language of peace and a set of disciplinary practices that strove to create orderly households and communities. The Quaker peace, I argue, perpetuated the expansion of slavery and colonization in the mid-Atlantic frontier, even as Friends struggled to rid themselves of moral and spiritual corruptions, which they saw as the root cause of violence.
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.