Chapters: Fair Play Territory: Geography and Topography --- The Fair Play Settlers: Demographic Factors --- The Politics of Fair Play --- The Farmers' Frontier --- Fair Play Society --- Leadership and the Problems of the Frontier --- Democracy on the Pennsylvania Frontier --- Frontier Ethnography and the Turner Thesis
Summary
The book discusses a self-governing community established in an area that was between today's Williamsport and Lock Haven, settled primarily by Scotch-Irish immigrants who had felt unwelcome in the Province of Pennsylvania.
"What Dr.Stoudt has done is to cull a variety of sources- military journals, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and published letters- and to reconstruct life at Valley Forge, day by day, during the terrible winter of 1777-1778. The 'chronicle' that emerges is not genuine history, since Dr.Stoudt has varied, modified, reorganized, transposed, and rewritten his source material to suit his purpose. This purpose is to dramatize that episode in American military history which has become a national symbol of courage and patriotism for the general reader and the Revolutionary Warbuff. As such,Ordeal at Valley Forge is a commendable effort." [From a book review by Milton Klein of Long Island University]
"Presented to the Lancaster County Historical Society in appreciation of Mr. J.W. Loose's effort extended to the Meiser family in the publications of their genealogy.
A detailed account of the engagements around Whitemarsh, PA, December 5-8 1777, which ended with Washington's forces retiring to Valley Forge. "After the reverses at Brandywine, Paoli and Germantown, it was significant that the skirmishes around Whitemarsh constituted an important moral victory for the American cause, for had General Howe succeeded in destroying the Continental Army by his well planned surprise attack, there might very well have been no Valley Forge!" [from the foreward]
