Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Benjamin Franklin Hall
427 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
5:30: Reception
6:00: Lecture
This event is free and open to the public. Please register to attend.
In Frontier Country, APS Librarian Patrick Spero offers a new interpretation of Pennsylvania’s history during the colonial and revolutionary eras. He argues that Pennsylvania’s development was forged on its frontiers through a series of formative but until now largely-overlooked confrontations: an eight-year-long border war between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1730s; the Seven Years’ War and conflicts with Native Americans in the 1750s; a series of frontier rebellions in the 1760s that rocked the colony and its governing elite; and wars Pennsylvania fought with Virginia and Connecticut in the 1770s over its western and northern borders. These violent encounters created what Spero describes as a distinctive “frontier society” on the eve of the American Revolution that transformed the once-peaceful colony of Pennsylvania into a “frontier country.”
About Patrick Spero
Patrick Spero is the Librarian and Director of the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia. As a scholar of early American history, Dr. Spero specializes in the era of the American Revolution. He has published over a dozen essays and reviews on the topic. His is the author of Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania and the edited anthology The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Prior to his appointment at the American Philosophical Society, Dr. Spero taught at Williams College where he served as an assistant professor of History and Leadership Studies and received recognition for his integration of new technology in the classroom. Dr. Spero has also held the position of Historian at the David Library of the Revolution and served on their Board of Trustees. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and has held long-term fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Society of the Cincinnati, the Doris Quinn Foundation, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the American Philosophical Society.
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