"The research and scholarship that went into the work are excellent; so good, in fact, that the book should be on the required text list for all Transappalachian frontier courses." --History
Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Sieur de Vincennes, John Francis Hamtramck, Little Turtle, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison, Tenskwatawa, Calvin Fletcher--along with many more familiar (and not so familiar) early Hoosiers.
Sales territory is worldwide A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier 1996; 360 pages, 20 b&w photos, 2 maps, index, 6 x 9 cloth 0-253-33048-3 $39.95 L / 28.50 paper 0-253-21217-0 $18.95 t / 13.50
A specialist in the history of early America and the Atlantic World, Andrew Robert Lee Cayton was Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A native of Cincinnati, he received a B.A. with high honors from the University of Virginia and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from Brown University. He was previously a Visiting Professor of History at The Ohio State University as well as the John Adams (Fulbright) Professor of American Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, The Washington Post Sunday Book World, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reviews in American History, The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic and The Great Plains Quarterly.
This was an interesting take, in which it went through the history chunk by chunk by focusing on historical figures in each. It was an interesting overview, though not heavily useful for my purposes.
I don't really like history, but I love historical novels. This book reads like a historical novel. It is extremely entertaining while telling the factual stories of the people and times of frontier Indiana.