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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s The last words my father spoke at a Quaker meeting for business related , at least indirectly, to John Woolman. David Morse, a member of Storrs Friends Meeting, wanted to travel to the Sudanese province of Darfur to protest the killings there. As he explained later, Morse hoped to model himself in part on Woolman, whose “challenge” had been “to make vivid the kidnapping of Africans ‘some thousand miles off’ to his mostly comfortable middle class audience.” He wanted to follow Woolman’s example not only in seeking to take dramatic action to confront distant suffering, but also in asking for guidance from his meeting first. Morse discovered that he could not get a visa to Sudan, and so he proposed instead to fly to Chad and enter Darfur from the west. When he asked the meeting whether this would be a wise decision, my father was skeptical. This is how Morse describes his response: “‘Chad? David, do you have any idea of the logistics involved in getting across the desert? How would you carry food?’ He grilled me unmercifully.” After a moment Morse “felt the meeting’s rejection bear down on me with the weight of lead.” (For the full story see David Morse, “Facing Evil: Genocide in Darfur,” Friends Journal (September 2005): 6–15, quotes 10, 12). Woolman’s name comes up frequently in American Quaker meetings. I was raised in a Quaker family, and I heard him mentioned fairly often as I was growing up. Therefore as I acknowledge those who helped me write this book I should start with the people who introduced me to Quakerism: my father John Plank, my mother Eleanor Plank, my sister Margaret Plank, my brother David Plank, and Friends Meetings in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bethesda, Maryland; Storrs, Connecticut; Cincinnati Ohio; Aberystwyth, Wales; and Evanston, Illinois. I am especially indebted to Oak Park Friends Meeting in Illinois, where I served as clerk for part of the time I was working on this book. My Quaker background introduced me to Woolman, but it was not the immediate inspiration for this work. On the contrary, my research into Woolman’s career grew out of my longstanding academic interest in the 292 Acknowledgments controversies surrounding the expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. From the outset I wanted to avoid relying on anachronistic intuition or Quaker lore. Instead I hoped to find eighteenth-century documentation on every question that arose. That goal, of course, was impossible to achieve, but in my pursuit of it I was extraordinarily well served by the librarians and archivists I met during my research. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Christopher Densmore of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, John Anderies and Ann Upton of the Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College, and the staffs at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, New Jersey State Archives, Huntington Library, British Library, Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, Leeds University Library, and Friends House Library. My research was generously funded by the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. I would like to thank the 2007–8 fellows at the McNeil Center, my former colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati, and my new colleagues in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, not only for affording me the time and space to work on this book, but also for hearing me ruminate on it and giving me their comments. I have presented papers on Woolman at several venues over the years, and I have received helpful feedback from more people than I can mention here, but the following individuals were among those who gave me useful leads and sharp advice: Brycchan Carey, Robert Duplessis, Jerry Frost, Dallett Hemphill, Jon Kershner , Mark Kharas, Marcelle Martin, Daniel Richter, Ellen Ross, Jonathan Sassi, and Michael Zuckerman. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Robert Lockhart has been involved in this work almost since its inception. He has been businesslike, direct , and attentive to the project at a fine level of detail. This is the third book I have written with Bob’s expert assistance, and I am profoundly indebted to him. The anonymous readers of my manuscript also gave me strong advice, and I would like to thank the staff at the press generally, and particularly Alison Anderson. Finally I...

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