Frontier country : the politics of war in early Pennsylvania / Patrick Spero.
Spero, Patrick, author
Philadelphia, PA : University Of Pennsylvania Press, [2016] , ©2016.
Early American studies.
Early American Studies
viii, 343 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.
French and Indian War (United States : 1754-1763)
Pennsylvania -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.
Insurgency -- Pennsylvania -- 18th century.
United States -- History -- French and Indian War, 1754-1763.
Pennsylvania -- Boundaries -- 18th century.
Maryland -- Boundaries -- 18th century.
Virginia -- Boundaries -- 18th century.
Connecticut -- Boundaries -- 18th century.
Insurgency.
Connecticut.
Maryland.
Frontier.
History.
Text in English.
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.
Introduction. Early American frontiers
Chapter 1. The hidden flaw
Chapter 2. Growth arrives
Chapter 3. The first frontier crisis
Chapter 4. Pennsylvania's apogee
Chapter 5. Becoming a frontier community
Chapter 6. Frontier politics
Chapter 7. The permanent frontier
Chapter 8. The British Empire's frontier crisis
Chapter 9. Independent frontier
Chapter 10. Creating a frontier government
Conclusion. Frontiers in a new nation
Coda. frontiers: meanings, controversies and new evidence.
Local notes:
Athenaeum copy: Gemmill fund bookplate.