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xxiii Acknowledgments I have accumulated many academic and personal debts during the years since I first began my research for this book. I owe a particularly large debt of gratitude to the faculty in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. My advisor, Professor Aaron Fogleman , provided me with years of personal and scholarly advice. During the course of my studies,Aaron became not only an academic advisor but a good friend, and he and his wife, vera Lind, let me and my wife, Shannon, stay rent free in their house for a year after I had finished graduate school and they were out of the country. This generous offer came as a sorely needed economic relief, and was made without hesitation, even though Aaron must have known than our laissez-faire approach to yard work meant that their lovely garden had regressed to a state of nature by the time they returned home. I would also like to thank Jim Schmidt and Sean Farrell for their help and encouragement, and my gratitude extends to all the faculty and staff in the History Department at Northern. The department kindly offered me a job as temporary faculty for a year while I was struggling to find an assistant professor position in a tight job market. My thanks also go to the faculty and staff in the Department of History at the University of Iowa and particularly to Jackie Rand, who always believed in my scholarship from the beginning, as well as to Stephen vlastos, with whom I have shared many pleasant conversations since I began at Iowa two years ago. I also owe a professional debt to the many hard workers at the archival institutions where I conducted my research. My thanks go to the archivists and staff at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark, the Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick ,the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the New-York Historical Society in New York City, the Connecticut State Archives in Hartford, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. Among these many professionals I would like to single out Ken Gray at the Ulster County xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Archives in Kingston and Jim Folts at the NewYork State Archives in Albany for special thanks. I am also grateful to the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, and the British Library in London for permission to use microfilms of their manuscript holdings, and to the staff at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, for the use of their microfilm collections. I also appreciate the kind assistance of the New York State Library in allowing me to reproduce a map from their collections in this manuscript. Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press deserves special mention for helping me see this book through to publication. Michael has been professional and helpful from the start, and he has done all he can to make the sometimes painful process of manuscript revision go as smoothly as possible. The anonymous reviewers enlisted by Cornell also deserve my thanks for their constructive criticisms and suggestions. I likewise tip my hat to the sharp pen of copy editor John Raymond. I also gratefully acknowledge Ethnohistory for their gracious cooperation in letting me include in this manuscript materials that appeared in an article published in their journal: “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson valley,” Ethnohistory 58:1 (Winter 2011): 91–112. My parents, Marit and Stein Midtrød, have always been a source of great support for me,and I thank my grandmother,Ingeborg Ødegaard,for passing on her love of history to me, even though she believes I came to it indirectly through her father, who passed away before I was born. Beyond my biological family, I would like to thank Mary Morse and Danette Oswood, who have been like sisters to me with their steadfast friendship. My wife, Shannon Coley, has been source of support in ways too many to name. She has patiently listened to my long expositions and monologues about Indians and Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and she has been my constant sounding board for successful and unsuccessful ideas. I have dedicated this book to my mother-in-law Lisa Coley, who welcomed me into her family as if I were one of her own and to our great sorrow passed...

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