Introduction / Patrick Griffin -- "The constant snare of the fear of man": authority and violence in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic / Andrew Cayton -- Destroying and reforming Canaan: making America British / Patrick Griffin -- "Not by force or violence": religious violence, anti-Catholicism, and the rights of conscience in the early national United States / Chris Beneke -- Government without arms; arms without government: the case of Pennsylvania / Jessica Choppin Roney -- Stamps and popes: rethinking the role of violence in the coming of the American Revolution / Peter C. Messer -- Social death and slavery : the logic of political association and the logic of chattel slavery in revolutionary America / Peter Thompson -- Violence and the limits of the political community in revolutionary Pennsylvania / Kenneth Owen -- Whiskey chaser: democracy and violence in the debate over the democratic-republican societies and the Whiskey Rebellion / Jeffrey L. Pasley -- Escaping insecurity: the American founding and the control of violence / David C. Hendrickson -- American Hercules: militant sovereignty and violence in the democratic-republican imagination, 1793-1795 / Matthew Rainbow Hale -- The Battle of Fallen Timbers: an assertion of U.S. sovereignty in the Atlantic world along the banks of the Maumee River / John C. Kotruch -- Epilogue / Peter Onuf