Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830

The eleven essays in this volume probe multicultural interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in eastern North America’s frontier zones from the late colonial era to the end of the early republic. Focusing on contact points between these groups, they construct frontiers as creative arenas that produced new forms of social and political organization.

Contributors to the volume offer fresh perspectives on a succession of frontier encounters from the era of the Seven Years’ War in Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina to the Revolutionary period in the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi basin in the early national era. Drawing on ethnography, cultural and literary criticism, border studies, gender theory, and African American studies, they open new ways of looking at intercultural contact in creating American identities. Collectively, the essays in Contact Points challenge ideas of either acculturation or conquest, highlighting instead the complexity of various frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in American history.

The contributors are Stephen Aron, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Gregory E. Dowd, John Mack Faragher, William B. Hart, Jill Lepore, James H. Merrell, Jane T. Merritt, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Elizabeth A. Perkins, Claudio Saunt, and Fredrika J. Teute.