Contact Points

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.<br/><p><br/>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 <i>Contact Points</i> challenge ideas of either acculturation or conquest highlighting instead the complexity of various frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in American history.<br/><p><br/>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.