Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew--until, with the arrival of the Seven Years' War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack.Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to...