Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley / Edition 1

by Elizabeth A. Perkins

Overview

In this original and sensitive ethnography of frontier life, Elizabeth Perkins recovers the rhythms of warfare, subsistence, and cultural encounter that governed existence on the margins of British America. Richly detailed, Border Life captures the intimate perceptive universe of the men and women who colonized Kentucky and southern Ohio during the Revolutionary era.

In reconstructing the mental world of border inhabitants, Perkins draws on a pioneering source in oral history. In the 1840s, the Reverend John Dabney Shane conducted hundreds of interviews with surviving western settlers, gathering their recollections on topics ranging from food preparation to encounters with Native Americans. Although Shane's interviews have long been hailed as a rich, if complicated, source for western history, Perkins is the first scholar to consider them critically, as texts for cultural analysis.

Border Life also deepens our understanding of how ordinary people struggled to make sense of their own lives within the stream of history. Discovering a significant disjuncture between recorded memory and written history in accounts of the early frontier, Perkins shows how historians and popular authors reshaped the messy complexities of remembered experience into heroic—and radically simplified—conquest narratives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807847039
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	05/25/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.62(d)
Lexile:	1410L (what's this?)

About the Author

Elizabeth A. Perkins is Gordon B. Davidson Associate Professor of History at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and former curator of the Kentucky Historical Society.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
A Note on Editorial Policy
Introduction

1. What They Themselves Know
2. Views of the Western Country
3. Distinctions and Partitions amongst Us
4. The Politics of Power
5. Indian Times

Appendix A. Item List of John D. Shane's "Historical Collections"
Appendix B. John D. Shane's Interview with Jane Stevenson, [ca. 1841-1842]
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Illustrations
1. The Ohio River Basin
2. John Dabney Shane, ca. 1850s
3. Printed broadside, 1838
4. Page from John D. Shane's interview with William Clinkenbeard, ca. 1841-43
5. "A New Map of the Western Parts of Virginia," by Thomas Hutchins, 1778
6. "This Map of Kentucke," by John Filson, 1784
7. Plan of fort at Boonesborough in 1778
8. "Spring Station Built in 1780"
9. Detail of Filson's map, 1784
10. Plan of Constant's Station in 1785
11. William Whitley's house (completed before 1794)

Tables
1. Geographic Origins of John Shane's Informants
2. Dates of Birth of John Shane's Informants
3. Dates of Arrival of John Shane's Informants
4. Ages at Arrival of John Shane's Informants
5. Ages of John Shane's Informants in 1843
6. Estimates of the Racial and Ethnic Origins of Kentucky's Population, 1790
7. Estimates of Wealth-Holding for Kentucky Heads of Households, 1792-1800

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Border Life deserves a wide readership. By exposing and analyzing the world of common settlers in the backcountry South, Perkins had given us a wonderful tool through which to teach the social history of the Revolutionary period.—Journal of Southern History



Marks the emergence of a new generation of frontier studies. . . . A superb study.—Ohio History



A study of ambiguity that utilizes the voices of ordinary people to understand how they coped with frontier life.—Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography



An important book, felicitous in its prose, lucid in its analysis, and wide-ranging in its observations. An extended meditation on the texture and meaning of western settlement in the Revolutionary generation, it is required reading for anyone interested in the origins of American 'border life'.—William and Mary Quarterly



A rich and thought-provoking exploration of important source material from a new perspective.—AB Bookman's Weekly



This is one of the only works I know that seriously reconstructs the 'collective memory' of American pioneers. Traditional frontier history told a story of progress. But Perkins provides striking evidence that the settlers knew too much to be seduced by triumphalist tales. She reveals their ambiguous feelings about their life work.—John Mack Faragher, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

A rich and thought-provoking exploration of important source material from a new perspective.

"AB Bookman s Weekly"

An important book, felicitous in its prose, lucid in its analysis, and wide-ranging in its observations.

"William and Mary Quarterly"

"An important book, felicitous in its prose, lucid in its analysis, and wide-ranging in its observations.

"William and Mary Quarterly""

A study of ambiguity that utilizes the voices of ordinary people to understand how they coped with frontier life.

"Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography"

Marks the emergence of a new generation of frontier studies.

"Ohio History"

Perkins had given us a wonderful tool through which to teach the social history of the Revolutionary period.

"Journal of Southern History"

From the Publisher