Contact Points

Contributors to the volume offer fresh perspectives on a
succession of frontier encounters from the era of the Seven
Years' War in Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina to the
Revolutionary period in the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi basin
in the early national era. Drawing on ethnography, cultural and
literary criticism, border studies, gender theory, and African
American studies, they open new ways of looking at intercultural
contact in creating American identities. Collectively, the essays
in Contact Points challenge ideas of either acculturation or
conquest, highlighting instead the complexity of various
frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in
American history.