| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel. Edited by Sterling Evans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. xxxv + 386 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliographies, index. $49.96, £37.95.)

The 1941 British feature film 49th Parallel, directed by Michael Powell, opens with a map of North America. As the camera focuses on the strongly marked U. S.-Canada borderline, the narrator declares: "I see a long straight line athwart a continent: no chain of forts, or deep flowing river or mountain range, but a line drawn by men upon a map nearly a century ago, accepted with a handshake and kept ever since. A boundary that divides nations yet marks their friendly meeting ground: The 49th parallel, the only undefended frontier in the world." Indeed, as John Herd Thompson argues in the volume's foreword, this arbitrarily chosen international boundary, running from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, has come to signify the distinct yet interrelated myths surrounding the Canadian and American Wests. In The Borderlands, editor Sterling Evans has compiled a worthy collection of essays from American and Canadian scholars that investigate the multiple meanings of the trans-boundary West from a variety of academic disciplines and methodologies. Each chapter tackles the question of When does the border matter? and if so, For whom?

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