The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh--groups that rarely intermingled in Europe--were thrown together when they confronted the American countryside. Rather than embracing the inescapable and ever-increasing diversity, the European settler...