American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest [Hardcover]

Gregory H. Nobles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1997

Gregory Nobles shows how American leaders, beginning with Washington and Jefferson, pursued a policy of national expansion and development that enabled the United States to become the dominant power on the North American continent. Within this broad framework, he explores the settlers' diverse and complex interactions with Indians as enemies, allies, and trading partners. The result is a sensitive, perceptive account of the patterns of contact and conquest on America's frontiers over the course of four centuries.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Gregory H. Nobles pulls together the work of many recent historians of the American West in this sensitive and synthesizing study of frontier history in North America. Using the frontier as both a spatial and phenomenological metaphor for the experience of Western expansion, Nobles considers the historical facts of frontier encounters and the frontier as cultural interchange between diverse people. Nobles's narrative begins and ends with the tragic story of the Pequots, from Captain John Mason's cowardly raid on a Pequot camp in 1637 that left more than 300 sleeping Pequots dead to Donald Trump's 1990s lawsuit attempting to deprive the tribe of their gambling license. In the pages of American Frontiers readers will also find details of the French and Indian War, Iroquois involvement in the American Revolution, the California gold rush, Texas independence, the tragedy of Wounded Knee, the resistance of Sitting Bull, and the Ghost Dance movement.

Nobles's book is a good starting point for readers interested in the American West. His bibliographic essay alone, which provides a generous and thorough account of literature on the subject, makes this a useful reference even for accomplished students of the frontier.

From Publishers Weekly

The author confesses he had to "unlearn" much of what he knew about the American frontier to write this complex, nuanced picture of white-Indian relations. After the American Revolution, Congress adopted the role of conqueror, according to this history, claiming sovereignty over Native American territories. Thomas Jefferson, who looked upon Indians as noble savages, played a decisive role in Euro-Americans' westward expansion, which, as Nobles shows, paved the way for Andrew Jackson's policy of forced removal and dispossession. Though Native Americans inevitably succumbed to white colonizers' brute force and devastating diseases, natives waged a continuing struggle and made strategic adjustments. Nobles, a Georgia Institute of Technology history professor, highlights the mutual exchanges between Euro-Americans and Amerindians that revolutionized the Indians' way of life, for better or worse. His synthesis of recent scholarship also illuminates changing attitudes toward white frontier folk. Initially stereotyped as bumpkins or unruly squatters, white settlers?the "shock troops" of national expansion?became revered symbols of a hardy frontier civilization. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 286 pages
• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub (January 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809024713
• ISBN-13: 978-0809024711
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,220,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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