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Appalachia’S Borderland Brokers: The Intersection Of Kinship, Diplomacy, And Trade On The Trans-Montane Backcountry, 1600-1800, Kevin T. Barksdale
Appalachia’S Borderland Brokers: The Intersection Of Kinship, Diplomacy, And Trade On The Trans-Montane Backcountry, 1600-1800, Kevin T. Barksdale
Kevin T. Barksdale
This paper and accompanying historical argument builds upon the presentation I made at last year’s Ohio Valley History Conference held at Western Kentucky University. In that presentation, I argued that preindustrial Appalachia was a complex and dynamic borderland region in which disparate Amerindian groups and Euroamericans engaged in a wide-range of cultural, political, economic, and familial interactions. I challenged the Turnerian frontier model that characterized the North American backcountry as a steadily retreating “fall line” separating the savagery of Amerindian existence and the epidemic civility of Anglo-America. On the Turnerian frontier, Anglo-American culture washed over the Appalachian and Native American …
“Facing East” From Iberian America: Postrevolutionary Spanish Policies In The Southwestern Backcountry, 1783-1792, Kevin T. Barksdale
“Facing East” From Iberian America: Postrevolutionary Spanish Policies In The Southwestern Backcountry, 1783-1792, Kevin T. Barksdale
Kevin T. Barksdale
Following the American Revolution, the new United States government and its citizenry greedily cast their eyes westward across the expansive trans-Appalachian frontier. The contest between the region’s native peoples, Anglo-American westerners, and Spanish colonists for the trans-Appalachian West began long before the first shots of the Revolution were fired at Lexington & Concord. From the near perpetual regional Indian warfare to the diplomatic maneuverings of Euroamerican backcountry leaders, the struggle to control the land the Indians called the “western waters” defined borderland relations for most of the 18th century. Historians have devoted a great deal of scholarly energy to chronicling …