Book Review

The development of the trans-Allegheny West from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries marked a watershed in American history. Indians, settlers, slaves, and imperial regimes witnessed colonial frontiers altered as the United States came into existence. Contact Points and Indiana, 1816–1850 broadly share a focus on that region of early America. Contact Points is a collection of cutting-edge essays on the history of North American frontiers. The book grew out of a conference sponsored by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture that called for papers elucidating "how contacts with others influenced groups' perceptions and practices or how contact between two or more cultures created something new, in cultural patterns, gender behavior and order, spatial arrangements and land use, and power relations." The resulting fine volume should interest western, Indian, cultural, and gender historians, as well as early Americanists. Building on Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991), the contributors analyze cultural exchange, conflict, and misunderstandings between groups. They also assert the uniqueness of the particular places, periods, and peoples that they are discussing, demonstrating that nothing was inevitable on the fluid frontiers of North America and that groups could subtly manipulate culture and language to suit their needs.	1
Because of such contingency and heterogeneity, the editors suggest that the essays are part of a historiography that "find[s] the significance of frontiers more in the process than in the outcome." An obvious critique of this perspective is that both are closely related. A danger of privileging process over outcome is an underanalysis of power relations. While conflict and power are addressed in all the essays, several aspects remain largely unexamined. A number of essays hint at the significance of a growing cultural construction of racial difference undermining earlier worlds of tenuous coexistence. With the exception of Elizabeth A. Perkins's piece on the Ohio Valley during the Revolutionary War, none really subjects the process to close scrutiny. Also surprising is the absence of sustained discussion of warfare as an agent of power and cultural exchange. Moreover, since the editors and authors assert the diversity of frontiers, important connections between regions are largely implicit in the volume. As Stephen Aron has previously and persuasively argued, while frontiers are not the same, historical experiences set precedents for subsequent encounters. The editors briefly make connections between the essays in the introduction, but the addition of a conclusion could have allowed them to make more explicit statements about the interrelation of those and other frontiers.	2
Nevertheless, the essays collectively reveal several common characteristics of multicultural borderlands. Essays by Gregory Evans Dowd, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Perkins, and Jill Lepore all point to the importance of discourse in shaping intercultural relations. In particular, Jane T. Merritt's fascinating discussion of power embedded in the use of metaphors and language on the colonial Pennsylvania frontier stands out. Virtually all the essays suggest the importance of gender ideals in shaping borderland culture. Claudio Saunt and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy specifically demonstrate that conflicting gender ideologies were pivotal in determining relations between and within groups and in shaping the economy. James H. Merrell, William B. Hart, and Perkins elucidate how situational identities evolved and spoke to power relations. Finally, Stephen Aron and John Mack Faragher argue that land hunger and underlying commitment to private property rights among Euro-Americans precluded the possibility of long-term middle grounds. Taken together, these essays are a major contribution to the historiography of early North America. Their theoretical insights will enrich cultural history in general and help conceptually remake the term "frontier." More specifically, the essays support the editors' claim that the eastern frontiers were complex, truly multicultural, and decisive in the history of early America.	. . .