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.