Description
Book SynopsisWith vivid descriptions of the various levels of this conflict, Moyer shows that the Wyoming controversy illuminates settlement, the daily lives of settlers, and agrarian unrest along the early American frontier.
Trade ReviewWild Yankees is a highly readable account of the turmoil in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley from the 1750s to the early 1800s. Paul B. Moyer characterizes the events as a farmers' revolution, and his key argument is that the contest over control of northeastern Pennsylvania (commonly referred to as the Yankee-Pennamite Wars) was part of a larger pattern of agrarian unrest that paralleled the Regulator Movement in North Carolina in the 1770s, Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts in the mid-1780s, and the Whiskey Rebellion in southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1790s.... It is a vivid account of the turmoil along Pennsylvania's northeastern frontier from the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century.... Wild Yankees certainly is an important contribution to the literature of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania, and it is a volume that anyone interested in frontier settlement, ethnic conflict, and Pennsylvania history should read.
* Pennsylvania History *
In Wild Yankees, Paul B. Moyer provides more than a fresh take on the sad history of the rural insurgency in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley. At the same time that Moyer unpacks the story of how Anglo-Americans competed violently with Native Americans and with each other, making his book a useful study for historians of Pennyslvania, he uses the fight for land to provide an alternative framework for understanding the American Revolution.
* Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography *
Moyer can hold his head high, having written for the northeastern Pennyslvania frontier a history comparable to Alan Taylor's Liberty Men and the Great Proprietors and Reeve Huston's Land and Freedom for upstate New York.
* American Historical Review *
The concept and pursuit of independence was not limited to actual war of high politics; it also resonated with ordinary people, such as the Wild Yankees, who pursued their own struggle for autonomy. With vivid descriptions of the various levels of the conflict, the author shows that the Wyoming controversy illuminates the process of settlement, the daily lives of settlers, and agrarian unrest along the early American frontier.
* Pennsylvania Heritage *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Farmer's Revolution1. "Among Quarrelsome Yankees, Insidious Indians, and Lonely Wilds": Natives, Colonists, and the Wyoming Controversy2. "A Great Many Wrangling Disputes": Authority, Allegiance, Property, and the Frontier War for Independence3. "A Dangerous Combination of Villains": The Social Context of Agrarian Resistance4. "All the Difficulties of Forming a New Settlement": Frontier Migration, Land Speculation, and Settler Insurgency5. "A Perfect Union with the People": Cultures of Resistance along the Revolutionary Frontier6. "Poor and Ignorant but Industrious Settlers": Frontier Development and the Path to Accommodation7. "Artful Deceivers": Yankee Notables and the Resolution of the Wyoming ControversyEpilogue: Closing the Revolutionary FrontierSelected Bibliography
Index
