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.
#3627276 in Books University of Pennsylvania Press 2010-03-25Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.02 x .94 x 5.98l; 1.60 #File Name: 0812242378352 pages
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