Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at Boston College. His
principal area of research and teaching is the history of migration
and popular protest in the Atlantic world. His first book, Making
Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), examined how traditions of agrarian
protest in nineteenth-century Ireland were translated into an
American industrial setting. His second book, The American
Irish: A History (2000), offered an interpretive survey of Irish migration to North America from 1700 to the present, including the Irish preconditions to mass emigration and questions of labor, social mobility, religion, race, gender, politics, and nationalism among the Irish in the United States. He is also the
author of a short pictorial history, The Irish: Towards the U.S.A.,
published in Italy as Gli irlandesi che hanno fatto l'America (2006).
And he is contributing editor of Ireland and the British
Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004), a collection of historical essays that launched the Companion
Series to the five-volume Oxford History of the British
Empire.
Professor Kenny's latest book, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment (2009), explains how Pennsylvania's early religious tolerance and social harmony disintegrated during the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for the province's Indians. Covering the period from Pennsylvania's foundation in the 1680s to its dissolution during the American Revolution, the book traces the emergence of intensifying forms of colonialist expropriation, from the flawed utopian vision of the founder, through the rapacious avarice of his sons, the French and Indian War, and Pontiac's War, to the consummation of a harsh new order during the Revolution. At the heart of the story is the extermination of the last twenty Conestoga Indians by a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys.