What’s a Pennamite?

Oh–yeah, you might be wondering. It’s an 18c. word for a person from Pennsylvania. It’s usually found in the phrase “Pennamite-Yankee Wars,” about a series of battles between Pennsylvania and Connecticut over the Wyoming Valley, running from before the American Revolution to the 1790s. I wrote my 1990 master’s thesis (starting, uh, twenty years ago this spring) about the role of maps in recording and shaping the changing situation of Pennsylvania’s northern frontier during that era.