Will Fenton

The following resources are recommended for further reading about the Paxton massacres and their aftermath. Many of the resources can be found at Digital Paxton, the Library Company’s digital history project. Digital Paxton, features nearly 3,000 pages of material, including 37 artworks, four books, 17 broadsides, 175 manuscripts, 27 newspaper issues, 69 pamphlets, and nine political cartoons, many of which have never before been digitized.

Digital Paxton

• Benjamin Bankhurst, “Anti-Presbyterianism.”
• Jack Brubaker, “The Aftermath of the Conestoga Massacre.”
• Jay Donis, “One Year Later: The Black Boys of 1765.”
• Nicole Eustace, “Condolence.”
• Will Fenton, “Introduction” and “A New Looking-Glass for the 1764 Paxton Pamphlet War.”
• Michael Goode, “Pontiac’s War and the Paxton Boys.”
• Scott Paul Gordon, “Elites” and “Print and Place in the Paxton Crisis.”
• Kevin Kenny, “Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Riots.”
• Angel Luke-O’Donnell, “Paratexts.”
• Darvin Martin, “A History of Conestoga Indiantown.”
• James P. Myers, Jr., “Anonymity.”
• Judith Ridner, “Material Culture” and “Passion, Politics, and Portrayal in the Paxton Debates.”

Books

• Jack Brubaker, Massacre of the Conestogas: On the Trail of the Paxton Boys in Lancaster County. History Press, 2010.
• Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
• Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Michael Goode and John Smolenski (eds.), The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic. Boston: Brill, 2018.
• Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.
• Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Michael McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
• James Merrill, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
• Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
• Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course, and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2008.
• Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Daniel Richter and William Pencak, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
• Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018.
• Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
• Peter Smolenksi, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
• Patrick Spero, Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Matthew Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754-1765. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
• Edward White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
• White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.