Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors

I read a lot of books, focusing especially on the borderlands between expanding European states and indigenous peoples. I'm lucky in having a good local library and recently got to borrow Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. Quote from the publisher's page:

"The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh—groups that rarely intermingled in Europe—were thrown together when they confronted the American countryside. Rather than embracing the inescapable and ever-increasing diversity, the European settler communities had their very existence threatened by the tensions and fears among their own groups. Only through “Indian-hating”—in both military and rhetorical forms—could the splintered colonists find a common ground."

I was glad to borrow it and not have bought it, for Silver has all the problems I associate with American Colonial Historians (caps for an Ivy Ph.D. hired at another Ivy-imagine that!) Our Savage Neighbors is a book by a American Colonial Historian for American Colonial Historians, not the rest of us. I simply could not tease out enough in the book to test his thesis, a problem I have with most books like this.

First, Silver assumes we are all familiar with the East Coast as he is, having grown up there, gone to school there, and employed there. No map of Western Pennsylvania, although Silver insists the geography of ridgelines is critical for Indian raids.

Secondly, despite having Indians as critical actors, there is not much about Indians here. For American Colonial Historians, Indians are the provenance of American Indian Historians, not American Colonial Historians.

Finally, Silver has the basic bad habit of most American Colonial Historians, lots and lots of quotes. I realize they have really good sources that lend themselves to lots of discourse analysis (Silver has an entire appendix on tracking "white" in colonial newspapers), but these do not need to be quoted all the time. Pretty much every paragraph has a quote, most have more than one and "[t]hey are ... the partially corected quotes" much left in the 18th-century vernacular. Annoying and needless, just waving ones learning at other American Colonial Historians.

But, most history is not written about the past, it is written for the historian, the historian's career, senior faculty (who must not be questioned), and colleagues (who must not be challenged.)