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American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest. By Gregory H. Nobles. (New York: Hill and Wang, I997. xvi + 286 pp., preface, introduction, epilogue, bibliographical essay, index. $24.00 cloth.)
A professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Gregory H. Nobles offers a synthesis describing how the United States "developed an overarching national agenda: to extend its authority across the continent" (242). After two brisk chapters devoted to the colonial era, he considers the development of "a frontier policy," the politics of expansion, the experience of the non-Indian emigrants, and the impact on American Indians of "the enclosing frontier" in the period from I860 to 1890.
American Frontiers provides a concise, clearly written narrative about an important subject. Although there are no footnotes, the author furnishes a twenty-four-page bibliographical essay that reveals his main sources and directs readers to major secondary works. Nobles has made an effort to read and employ significant ethnohistorical studies from the colonial and early national periods. In a similar sense, he takes advantage of the new work on place...