A Town In-Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Early Mid-Atlantic Interior

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments A project that has taken as long as this one incurs many debts. Where do I begin to offer my thanks? To be sure, the staff at many libraries and archives aided immensely in this work. While researching this book, I spent months at the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The staffs at these libraries offered valuable advice on their collections and leads to sources. I owe special thanks to historian Merri Lou Schaumann at CCHS. Aside from her voluminous work on early Carlisle, from which I draw heavily in this book, she directed me toward several important sources, including the 1751 map of Carlisle that appears in Chapter 1. In addition to those libraries, I spent time working with the sources at Dickinson College’s Archives and Special Collections—a gem of a small-college archives—as well as the Pennsylvania State Archives, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. A research fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution was also invaluable to my revisions. It was there that I found some of the most provocative materials tucked away in the reels of the Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan Papers. I offer my sincerest thanks to staff at all of these institutions for their assistance. I also wish to thank the editors at PMHB and University of Tennessee Press for permission to republish sections of the article “Relying on the Saucy Men of the Backcountry: Middlemen and the Fur Trade in Pennsylvania,” which appeared in PMHB 129 (2005): 133–62, and parts of the essay, “Status, Culture, and the Structural World in the Valley of Pennsylvania,” which appeared as Chapter 6 in After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800-1900. ed. Kenneth E. Koons and Warren R. Hofstra (Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, 2000). 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 285 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 285 2/2/10 10:36:27 AM 2/2/10 10:36:27 AM 286 acknowledgments I have numerous other professional debts to honor. As a graduate student, I was generously supported by the History Department at William & Mary and the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies (now the McNeil Center) at the University of Pennsylvania. I owe my advisor, Jim Whittenburg, and Richard Dunn, then-Director of the Philadelphia Center, many thanks for their support and the hours they put into reading and commenting on a much earlier version of this work. Since completing my degree, the two institutions where I have held faculty appointments— California State University, Northridge and, since 1998, Muhlenberg College —have supported the research and writing of this book with numerous faculty research grants. Equally if not more significant, however, are my history department colleagues at these two institutions. Several of them, including Tom Maddux at Northridge and Dan Wilson at Muhlenberg, read and commented on chapters. I especially appreciate the time they took from their own projects to advise me on mine. Tom Maddux, especially, always had faith in me and this project. I appreciated his support then and still do. I also want to thank my colleagues at these institutions who have become such close friends over the years. My very dear friend and colleague Denise Spooner, with whom I shared an office for a time at Northridge, has been a confidante for many years now. She, perhaps more than anyone else, heard about all of the trials and tribulations of this project—and my life. She took time from her own busy schedule to proofread the manuscript. I know that her sharp editorial eye clarified my prose and I thank her so much for her hard work. But more important, I thank her (and her husband, Joe) for her friendship and the counseling she offered (for free!) over the years that we have known each other. I am sure she must have wondered how a specialist in twentiethcentury California came to be reading a manuscript on eighteenth-century Carlisle. But as she knows after teaching at Northridge, anything is possible . At Muhlenberg I have many debts as well. My History Department colleagues , including Anna Adams, Susan Clemens-Bruder, Mark Stein, Tom Cragin, and Gary Jones, offered not just advice and encouragement about my work, but also their friendship. I count myself lucky to be a part of such a great department. Still other professional colleagues shaped this book in critical ways. Owen S...