Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4486448

1945-2314

Laura L. Nelson,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Interest in the trans-Appalachian frontier has grown steadily over the past few years. Advances in methodology and historiographic emphasis—including “the new social history”; “the new Indian history”; ethnohistory; regional and local history; material culture studies; evolving sensibilities of race, culture, ethnicity, and gender created with feminist and ethnic studies; and cross-disciplinary understandings derived from ethnography, cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, and archaeology—have given present-day practitioners tools of unprecedented power and sophistication. Indeed, the field is defined by academic excellence and creative vitality. The Boundaries between Us, edited by assistant professor of history at Robert Morris University Daniel P. Barr, is the most recent in a series of anthologies that explore the eastern frontier experience during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Barr seeks to build on existing scholarship through a study of topics ranging chronologically from the Seven Years' War through Indian removal “while asking new questions about the relationships between natives and newcomers” (p. 12). Together, the eleven essays in this volume “offer a broad historical perspective on a century of contact, interaction, conflict, and displacement that aspires to offer new avenues of inquiry for unfolding discussions in the history of the Old Northwest Territory, as well as the history of early America, the eastern frontier, and cultural interaction between native peoples and newcomers” (p. xii). It is an ambitious agenda, and Barr meets it admirably.