Frontier Country

Download or read book Frontier Country written by Patrick Spero and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Growing Up with the Country written by Elliott West and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illustrated study shows how frontier life shaped children's character.

Download or read book The Frontier Republic written by Andrew Robert Lee Cayton and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflict invariably characterizes the period following any revolution, and post-revolutionary America was no exception. After the unity inspired by opposition to a common enemy dissipates, revolutionary movements generally splinter into different groups that compete with each other for the right to shape the values and structures of the new society. The Frontier Republic examines the form these conflicts took in the settlement of the Ohio Country, as thousands of Americans streamed onto the lands west of the Appalachians. These settlers had experienced revolution and migration: now the process of creating new communities and a new state in the Northwest Territory forced them to deliberate on, and define, what these upheavals had accomplished. At issue was the very nature of human society and the role of government in it. Jeffersonian Republican ideals of individual liberty and local sovereignty were at odds with the Federalist vision of a well-ordered society and political control on the national level. Disagreements arose over such topics as rights of squatters, establishment of authority of the national government, the statehood movement, and the location of the new state's capital. The effects of the Panic of 1819 and the need for internal improvements changed the early focus on individualism to an understanding of Ohio's place in an interdependent society. Although this first generation of settlers failed to resolve their disputes completely, they ensured that the ideological foundation of nineteenth-century Ohio would be a synthesis of their conflicting revolutionary visions of the future of the United States.

Download or read book Shadow Country written by Peter Matthiessen and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2008-08-19 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.”—Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone—Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century—were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Praise for Shadow Country “Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson’s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate.”—Los Angeles Times “Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It’s the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes.”—Don DeLillo “The fiction of Peter Ma­­tthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone’s highest expectations for great writing.” —Richard Ford “Shadow Country, Matthiessen’s distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy.”—W. S. Merwin “[An] epic masterpiece . . . a great American novel.”—The Miami Herald

Download or read book Frontier Indiana written by Andrew R. L. Cayton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-22 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most history concentrates on the broad sweep of events, battles and political decisions, economic advance or decline, landmark issues and events, and the people who lived and made these events tend to be lost in the big picture. Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Jean-Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes; George Croghan, the ultimate frontier entrepreneur; the world as seen by George Rogers Clark; Josiah Hamar and John Francis Hamtramck; Little Turtle; Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison and William Henry Harrison; Tenskwatawa; Jonathan Jennings; Calvin Fletcher; and many others. Focusing his account on these and other representative individuals, Cayton retells the story of Indiana's settlement in a human and compelling narrative which makes the experience of exploration and settlement real and exciting. Here is a book that will appeal to the general reader and scholar alike while going a long way to reinfusing our understanding of history and the historical process with the breath of life itself.

Download or read book Frontier Country written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Texas Frontier written by Ty Cashion and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: diversification to form a ranching-based social and economic way of life. The process turned a largely southern people into westerners. Others helped shape the history of the Clear Fork country as well. Notable among them were Anglo men and women - some of them earnest settlers, others unscrupulous opportunists - who followed the first pioneers; Indians of various tribes who claimed the land as their own or who were forcibly settled there by the white government; and.