In Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution, Charles E. Brooks explains how the Holland Land Purchase--in which the Holland Land Company purchased 3.3 million acres of land in western New York State--contributed to the development of a frontier region.

2014 Reprint of 1894 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. The "Frontier Thesis" or "Turner Thesis," is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1894 that American democracy was formed by the American Frontier. He stressed the process-the moving frontier line-and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed consequences of a ostensibly limitless frontier and that American democracy and egalitarianism were the principle results. In Turner's thesis the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won very wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

In this pioneering book Daniel Usner examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana, including the province of West Florida. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South. Usner begins by providing a chronological overview of events from French settlement of the area in 1699 to Spanish acquisition of West Florida after the Revolution. He then shows how early confrontations and transactions shaped the formation of Louisiana into a distinct colonial region with a social system based on mutual needs of subsistence. Usner's focus on commerce allows him to illuminate the motives in the contest for empire among the French, English, and Spanish, as well as to trace the personal networks of communication and exchange that existed among the territory's inhabitants. By revealing the economic and social world of early Louisianians, he lays the groundwork for a better understanding of later Southern society.

The last decade has seen a major shift in the way nineteenth-century American history is interpreted, and increasing attention is being paid to the market revolution occurring between 1815 and the Civil War. This collection of twelve essays by preeminent scholars in nineteenth-century history aims to respond to Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution, reflecting upon the historiographic accomplishments initiated by his work, while at the same time advancing the argument across a range of fields.

In Jacksonian Promise historian Daniel Feller offers a fresh look at the United States in the tumultuous Age of Jackson. Viewing the era through the eyes of people who lived in it, Feller's account captures the optimism and energy that filled America after the War of 1812. His emphasis on Americans' confidence in the future and faith in improvement challenges historians who depict the Jacksonian temperament in terms of anxiety and foreboding. Jacksonian Promise opens with the Jubilee anniversary of Independence in 1826, when Americans celebrated their national birthright of liberty and opportunity. Blessed with abundant resources and what they held to be the best government on earth, citizens believed they could accomplish nearly anything. They felt it in their power to remake themselves, their country, and the world. Feller traces the influence of this enterprising spirit across a broad range of Jacksonian activity. Experiment and innovation flourished as Americans built canals and factories, founded unions and utopias, staged religious revivals and moral crusades, and campaigned to eradicate social ills and to purify law and politics. Yet despite their common source, competing programs of progress soon clashed with each other. As citizens organized to pursue their hopes for America's future, divisions arose among that pointed ultimately toward civil war.

This detailed exploration of the settlement of Maine beginning in the late eighteenth century illuminates the violent, widespread contests along the American frontier that served to define and complete the American Revolution. Taylor shows how Maine's militant settlers organized secret companies to defend their populist understanding of the Revolution.

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

When the South bombarded Fort Sumter in April 1861, the Ellithorpe family in rural New York answered President Lincoln’s call to defend the Union. For the next four years, the two Ellithorpe brothers and two of their brothers-in-law fought in some of the Civil War’s most storied regiments, on nearly every major battlefield in the East. In this utterly unique Civil War history/biography, John A. Simpson reconstructs the intertwined lives and wars of four Union soldiers, from Bull Run to Gettysburg and beyond. When the Civil War broke out, Phillip Ellithorpe, Philander Ellithorpe, Asa Burleson, and Oliver Moore did not hesitate to volunteer to fight for the Union. Their service would encompass virtually every branch of the Northern army: infantry (including sharpshooters), cavalry (mounted and dismounted), and artillery as well as commissary, engineering, and ambulance duty. They would serve in six different regiments: the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves (the legendary Bucktails); the 27th New York Infantry (the Union Regiment); the 2nd New York Mounted Rifles; the 5th Vermont Infantry; the 1st New York Dragoons; and the 1st Minnesota, which gained immortality at Gettysburg. They would participate in the major battles of the war’s Eastern theater: First Bull Run, the Peninsula, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Grant’s Overland campaign through Petersburg. Phillip would die at Gettysburg, and the other three would return home and live under the shadow of the Civil War for the rest of their lives. All for the Union tells the dramatic story of these four soldiers, weaving their lives and wars into a tapestry of how one family navigated home front and battle front during the Civil War. Based on 180 family letters, voluminous primary and second sources, and visits to homes and battlefields from Allegany County, New York, to Richmond, Virginia, All for the Union is a remarkable contribution to Civil War history.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE A new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall. Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation – democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history – from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion – fighting wars and opening markets – served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.