Synopses & Reviews
The eleven essays in this volume probe multicultural interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in eastern North America's frontier zones from the late colonial era to the end of the early republic. Focusing on contact points between these groups, they construct frontiers as creative arenas that produced new forms of social and political organization.
Contributors to the volume offer fresh perspectives on a succession of frontier encounters from the era of the Seven Years' War in Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina to the Revolutionary period in the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi basin in the early national era. Drawing on ethnography, cultural and literary criticism, border studies, gender theory, and African American studies, they open new ways of looking at intercultural contact in creating American identities. Collectively, the essays in Contact Points challenge ideas of either acculturation or conquest, highlighting instead the complexity of various frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in American history.
The contributors are Stephen Aron, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Gregory E. Dowd, John Mack Faragher, William B. Hart, Jill Lepore, James H. Merrell, Jane T. Merritt, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Elizabeth A. Perkins, Claudio Saunt, and Fredrika J. Teute.
Review
One of the best collections to date on the history of early American frontiers and Indian-white relations.
Wisconsin Magazine of History
Review
A major contribution to the historiography of early North America. Their theoretical insights will enrich cultural history.
Journal of American History
Review
This is a must read for those with interests in new perspectives on Native cultures.
Journal of the West
Review
[An] excellent volume.
Journal of Southern History
Review
An impressive sampling of a fresh wave of scholarly investigation into the first transmontane expansion of American society.
Journal of the Early Republic
Synopsis
Eleven essays probe multicultural interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in eastern North America's frontier zones from 1750 to 1830.
Synopsis
One of the best collections to date on the history of early American frontiers and Indian-white relations.
Wisconsin Magazine of History A major contribution to the historiography of early North America. Their theoretical insights will enrich cultural history.
Journal of American History This is a must read for those with interests in new perspectives on Native cultures.
Journal of the West [An] excellent volume.
Journal of Southern History An impressive sampling of a fresh wave of scholarly investigation into the first transmontane expansion of American society.
Journal of the Early Republic
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
List of Maps
Introduction: On the Connection of Frontiers / Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute
Shamokin, "the very seat of the Prince of darkness": Unsettling the Early American Frontier /James H. Merrell
Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier /Jane T. Merritt
Black "Go-Betweens" and the Mutability of "Race," Status, and Identity on New York's Pre-Revolutionary Frontier / William B. Hart
"Insidious Friends": Gift Giving and the Cherokee-British Alliance in the Seven Years' War /Gregory Evans Dowd
"Domestick . . . Quiet being Broke": Gender Conflict among Creek Indians in the Eighteenth-Century / Claudio Saunt
Pigs and Hunters: "Rights in the Woods" on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier / Stephen Aron
Distinctions and Partitions among Us: Identity and Interaction in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley /Elizabeth A. Perkins
"Noble Actors" upon "the Theatre of Honour": Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville /Andrew R. L. Cayton
To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760-1832 / Lucy Eldersveld Murphy
"More Motley than Mackinaw": From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783-1833 / John Mack Faragher
Remembering American Frontiers: King Philip's War and the American Imagination / Jill Lepore
Bibliography
Conference Program
Index
Notes on the Contributors
Maps
Shamokin and the Susquehanna Country
The Cherokee British Alliance, 1756-1759
The Deep South Interior, circa 1800
The Upper Ohio Valley in the Late Eighteenth Century
The Fox-Wisconsin Region, circa 1827