Reviewed by John Smolenski | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 216 words from this article are provided below; about 1822 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by John Smolenski | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763. By JANE T. MERRITT . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 2003. Pp. xii, 338. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Reviewed by John Smolenski , University of California, Davis

It sometimes seems as if historians spend as much time arguing about the metaphors we use to describe spaces of interaction between European colonizers and indigenous peoples as we do analyzing those spaces themselves. Whether calling these areas "frontiers," "borderlands," "contact points," or the "backcountry," scholars have been very deliberate about the term(s) they use to describe these regions of cultural contact, conquest, and colonization. ¹ Nor is the decision to adopt one term over another merely semantic. Comparing two major works in the field—Richard White's celebrated Middle Ground and James Merrell's Bancroft Prize-winning Into the American Woods—is instructive here. The difference between White's description of the pays d'en haut as a "middle ground" and Merrell's discussion of Pennsylvania's frontier as a dark and dangerous "woods" reveals sharp distinctions in the authors' conceptual and interpretive frameworks and their assessments of the possibilities for some kind of peace and amity in the North American colonial encounter. ²

. . .

There are about 1822 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.