2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Peter Silver
for Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (W.W. Norton & Company)

Judges' Citation

"We tend to take so much pride in what we call American values—pluralism, tolerance, the spirit of democratic equality—that we rarely stop to ask how, historically, we came to hold them. Peter Silver's brilliant analysis of frontier violence in the era of the Seven Years' War and the Revolution disturbingly suggests that they depended first of all on the creation of a terrifying enemy. In compulsively readable, quicksilver prose, he shows how ethnically and religiously fragmented settler groups who in times of peace shared little beyond mutual dislike and distrust found common ground in their fear of Indians and came to think of themselves less as English or Scots or Germans than as white people—and Americans—under the pressure of war. This story has none of the hero-worship and self-congratulation that afflict so many accounts of the nation's founding era, and is all the more important for that. A profound and morally complex meditation on the origins of the American character, Our Savage Neighbors will leave no reader unchallenged, and none unmoved. It is in every sense a remarkable accomplishment."

Bio

Peter Silver was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and brought up mostly in Richmond, Indiana. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied English and American history and literature, and at Yale University, where his dissertation was supported by a Whiting Fellowship and awarded the John Addison Porter Prize. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in colonial and revolutionary North American history, with special interests in American Indian history, religious history, and comparative colonial and imperial histories. He is currently an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, where he has held the Richard Allen Lester University Preceptorship. Our Savage Neighbors is his first book. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Mona and daughter Celia, spending holiday time in Maine and Oslo, Norway.

Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Fred Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Caroline Elkins, associate professor of history at Harvard University; and Jane Kramer, European correspondent for The New Yorker.

Journalism Awards

2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Winner