Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (Early American Studies) - Softcover

Spero, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812224167 ISBN 13: 9780812224160

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Synopsis

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies. These violent encounters created what Spero describes as a distinctive "frontier society" on the eve of the American Revolution that transformed the once-peaceful colony of Pennsylvania into a "frontier country."

Spero narrates Pennsylvania's story through a sequence of formative but until now largely overlooked confrontations: an eight-year-long border war between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1730s; the Seven Years' War and conflicts with Native Americans in the 1750s; a series of frontier rebellions in the 1760s that rocked the colony and its governing elite; and wars Pennsylvania fought with Virginia and Connecticut in the 1770s over its western and northern borders. Deploying innovative data-mining and GIS-mapping techniques to produce a series of customized maps, he illustrates the growth and shifting locations of frontiers over time. Synthesizing the tensions between high and low politics and between eastern and western regions in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, Spero recasts the importance of frontiers to the development of colonial America and the origins of American Independence.

About this title

About the Author

Patrick Spero is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society. As a scholar of early American history, he specializes in the era of the American Revolution, and has published over a dozen essays and reviews on the topic. He is the author of Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 (Norton, 2018), and of Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania, and The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century, both of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812224167
• ISBN 13: 9780812224160
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352