Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809016028 ISBN 13: 9780809016020

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1998

Gregory Nobles shows how American leaders, beginning with Washington and Jefferson, pursued a policy of national expansion and development that enabled the United States to become the dominant power on the North American continent. Within this broad framework, he explores the settlers' diverse and complex interactions with Indians as enemies, allies, and trading partners. The result is a sensitive, perceptive account of the patterns of contact and conquest on America's frontiers over the course of four centuries.

Review:

Gregory H. Nobles pulls together the work of many recent historians of the American West in this sensitive and synthesizing study of frontier history in North America. Using the frontier as both a spatial and phenomenological metaphor for the experience of Western expansion, Nobles considers the historical facts of frontier encounters and the frontier as cultural interchange between diverse people. Nobles's narrative begins and ends with the tragic story of the Pequots, from Captain John Mason's cowardly raid on a Pequot camp in 1637 that left more than 300 sleeping Pequots dead to Donald Trump's 1990s lawsuit attempting to deprive the tribe of their gambling license. In the pages of American Frontiers readers will also find details of the French and Indian War, Iroquois involvement in the American Revolution, the California gold rush, Texas independence, the tragedy of Wounded Knee, the resistance of Sitting Bull, and the Ghost Dance movement.

Nobles's book is a good starting point for readers interested in the American West. His bibliographic essay alone, which provides a generous and thorough account of literature on the subject, makes this a useful reference even for accomplished students of the frontier.

About the Author:

Gregory H. Nobles is the author of Divisions Throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts 1740-1775 and American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest, and co-author of Evolution and Revolution: American Society 1600-1820. His articles have appeared in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of Social History, and the Journal of American History. He has held numerous research grants, including three from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and at the American Antiquarian Society, where he was elected to membership in 1995. He has also been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in New Zealand (1995), and in 2002 he will hold a Fulbright Distinguished Professorship in the Netherlands, the John Adams Chair in American History at the University of Amsterdam.