Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Frontier Illinois. By James E. Davis. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xxiv, 515 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-253-33423-3.)

In Frontier Illinois, James E. Davis sails against the tide of recent studies of North American frontiers. Where many historians have emphasized darker aspects of life in regions of multicultural contact, he offers an essentially optimistic perspective on the origins of one of the most important states in the American Union. Repeatedly asserting that "frontier Illinois was amazingly tranquil," Davis ascribes this phenomenon to several factors. "Foremost" among them was the existence of a "powerful consensus" built around the general principles of Protestantism, republicanism, land ownership, racial exclusivity, a "faith in judicial processes," and a "need for broad tolerance, if not acceptance." . . .

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