| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754–1799. By Larry L. Nelson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1999. xvi, 262 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-87338-620-5.)

Over the past decade, historians have begun to reexamine the importance of the once unfashionable topics of frontiers, borderlands, and empires. Not only is each important in and of itself, many now rightly argue, but scholars are now asking how each is related to the others, at what points they intersect one another, and how each relates to nation building. Larry L. Nelson's biography of the (in)famous British Indian agent Alexander McKee (c. 1735–1799) sheds new light on the importance of those three topics. 1

Like many individuals born in the Great Lakes region in the eighteenth century, McKee was of mixed ancestry. His father was a Pennsylvania trader and his mother a Shawnee. McKee benefited significantly from each of his parents' cultures. As Nelson notes, though, historians have never quite figured out how to categorize those of mixed ancestry. Stereotypes abound in historical literature, and many regard mixed-bloods as unscrupulous or shrewd, marginal, or tragically caught in a no-man's-land. Instead, as Nelson proves, "McKee enjoyed great success as a mediator because he had full access to and great influence with decision makers and elites on both sides of the cultural divide." . . .

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