This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Of "Good Laws" and "Good Men" reveals how a Quaker minority in the Delaware Valley used the law to its own advantage yet maintained the legitimacy of its rule. William Offutt, Jr., places legal processes at the center of this region's social history. The new societies established there in the late 1600s did not rely on religious conformity, culture, or a simple majority to develop successfully, Offutt maintains. Rather, they succeeded because of the implementation of reforms that gave the expanding population faith in the legitimacy of legal processes introduced by a Quaker elite. Offutt's painstaking investigation of the records of more than 2,000 civil and 1,100 criminal cases in four county courts over a thirty-year period shows that Quakers - the "Good Men" - were disproportionately represented as justices, officers, and jurors in this system of "Good Laws" they had established, and that they fared better than did the rest of the population in dealing with it.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Law – charters, statutes, judicial decisions, and traditions – mattered in colonial America, and laws about religion mattered a lot. The legal history of colonial America reveals that America has been devoted to the free exercise of religion since well before the First Amendment was ratified. Indeed, the two colonies originally most opposed to religious liberty for anyone who did not share their views, Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually became bastions of it. By focusing on law, Scott Douglas Gerber offers new insights about each of the five English American colonies founded for religious reasons – Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts – and challenges the conventional view that colonial America had a unified religious history.

Peter Gunnarson Rambo, son of Gunnar Petersson, was born in about 1612 in Hisingen, Sweden. He came to America in 1640 and settled in Christiana, New Sweden (now Delaware). He married Brita Mattsdotter 7 April 1647. They had eight children. He died in 1698. HIs daughter, Gertrude Rambo, was born 19 October 1650. She married Anders Bengtsson. Descendants and relatives lived mainly in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio.

"Examines the life of 18th century German immigrant and businessman Caspar Wistar. Reevaluates the modern understanding of the entrepreneurial ideal and the immigrant experience in the colonial era"--Provided by publisher.

Originally published in 1994. In this pathbreaking book Alan Tully offers an unprecedented comparative study of colonial political life and a rethinking of the foundations of American political culture. Tully chooses for his comparison the two colonies that arguably had the most profound impact on American political history—New York and Pennsylvania, the rich and varied colonies at the geographical and ideological center of British colonial America. Fundamental to the book is Tully's argument that out of Anglo-American influences and the cumulative character of each colonial experience, New York and Pennsylvania developed their own distinctive but complementary characteristics. In making this case Tully enters—from a new perspective—the prominent argument between the "classical republican" and "liberal" views of early American public thought. He contends that the radical Whig element of classical republicanism was far less influential than historians have believed and that the political experience of New York and Pennsylvania led to their role as innovators of liberal political concepts and discourse. In a conclusion that pursues his insights into the revolutionary and early republican years, Tully underlines a paradox in American political development: not only were the pathbreaking liberal politicians of New York and Pennsylvania the least inclined towards revolutionary fervor, but their political language and concepts—integral to an emerging liberal democratic order—were rooted in oligarchical political practice. "A momentous contribution to the burgeoning literature on the middle Atlantic region, and to the vexed question of whether it constitutes a coherent cultural configuration. Tully argues persuasively that it does, and his arguments will have to be reckoned with like few that have gone before, even as he develops an array of differences between the two colonies more subtle and penetrating than any of his predecessors has ever put forth."—Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania.

"American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories.".

American historians have long been fascinated by the "peopling" of North America in the seventeenth century. Who were the immigrants, and how and why did they make their way across the ocean? Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to British immigrants who came as free people or as indentured servants (primarily to New England and the Chesapeake) and to Africans who were forced to come as slaves. Trade in Strangers focuses on the eighteenth century, when new immigrants began to flood the colonies at an unprecedented rate. Most of these immigrants were German and Irish, and they were coming primarily to the middle colonies via an increasingly sophisticated form of transport. Wokeck shows how first the German system of immigration, and then the Irish system, evolved from earlier, haphazard forms into modern mass transoceanic migration. At the center of this development were merchants on both sides of the Atlantic who organized a business that enabled them to make profitable use of underutilized cargo space on ships bound from Europe to the British North American colonies. This trade offered German and Irish immigrants transatlantic passage on terms that allowed even people of little and modest means to pursue opportunities that beckoned in the New World. Trade in Strangers fills an important gap in our knowledge of America's immigration history. The eighteenth-century changes established a model for the better-known mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which drew wave after wave of Europeans to the New World in the hope of making a better life than the one they left behind—a story that is familiar to most modern Americans.