Borderers

Borderers is a story of race, religion, class, and community at the dawn of America. It traces the journeys of two families of southern backwoodsmen from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast over the course of four generations. Their migrations form a thread that ties together a larger narrative of America becoming itself as it shapes itself around them as they travel and shapes them into Americans. Through their lives, we can watch the evolution of their world.
Find out more at http: //carla.rabinowitz.com.

from Mark Mancall, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

The imagination has always been a powerful instrument in the historian’s toolbox. Carla Rabinowitz’s remarkably seamless combination of the historian’s craft and imagination in this family history deepens our understanding of the extraordinary complexity of what we take for granted as the seemingly obvious in the present. The complexities in the story Rabinowitz brings to light compel the reader to honor our own diversity and our own history in an intensely personal and intimate way.

from Allen Young, award-winning journalist and author of North of Quabbin Revisited and Left, Gay and Green

Borderers offers readers an insight into an America unknown to most history majors. Moved by curiosity about her own ancestry, Carla Rabinowitz embarked on a seventeen-year research project, not only about her own relatives but also about the wide variety of people and events they encountered in the early years of the Republic. Focusing on the lives of her great-great and great-great-great grandparents on the pre-Civil War southern border, the author introduces us to surprising facts about a diverse community of frontiersmen, Indians, enslaved blacks, and free people of color. There are wars, rebellions, crimes, and misdemeanors plus family dramas involving Anglicans, Quakers, and an assortment of Baptists, plus Loyalists, Patriots, Masons, corrupt officials, Highland Scots, Scots-Irish, and French habitants.