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

by Andrew R.L. Cayton (Editor), Fredrika J. Teute (Editor)

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.

Genres: History

408 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 1998

About the author

A specialist in the history of early America and the Atlantic World, Andrew Robert Lee Cayton was Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A native of Cincinnati, he received a B.A. with high honors from the University of Virginia and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from Brown University. He was previously a Visiting Professor of History at The Ohio State University as well as the John Adams (Fulbright) Professor of American Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, The Washington Post Sunday Book World, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reviews in American History, The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic and The Great Plains Quarterly.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contact Points provides an excellent collection of essays from top ethno-historians including James Axtell, Jane Merritt, Claudio Saunt, and many more. There topics cover a wide range of years and areas all over the eastern seaboard and out into Missouri and the Great Lakes. The general idea of the book is to examine the "frontier" that has been defined in a variety of ways throughout this scholarship. In this case the frontier is defined as a nebulous area where two or more cultures come together. The original frontier thesis proposed by Frederick Jackson turner is in need of revision and this book seeks to offer an explanation. While no one book provides the answer this one does show a reasonable account for defining that frontier. There are strong and weak essays in this book and some don't follow the theme of the frontier as closely as they could but overall it is an excellent survey. This combines many of the top minds on various tribes and explores how the Native Americans and euroamerican interacted in the colonial and post-colonial world.

Some of the topics included
A look at the Delaware, Iroquois and Moravian interactions at Shamokin
A look at the Delaware interactions with the Proprietors and Quakers in Bethlehem.
The changing role of women in Creek society
The role race played in interactions between slaves, whites and Indians
How memory is affected by the events of the colonial era

and many more.