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.
#1986076 in Books Ingramcontent 2016-11-21 2016-11-21Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.37 x .93 x 6.31l; .0 #File Name: 0807163589280 pagesAlbert C Ellithorpe the First Indian Home Guards and the Civil War on the Trans Mississippi Frontier
Review
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A Wonderful Blend of Original Sources and ContextualizationBy Gary T. JohnsonThe title is a mouthful; but the fact is that this intriguing book does triple duty. First; there is the story of Albert C. Ellithorpe; who in addition to his service in the Civil War; led a colorful life in Chicago as a businessman; inventor; and prominent citizen. Second; is the account of the First Indian Home Guards; the tri-racial unit that Ellithorpe led. And third; there is a window onto a rarely illuminated theater of the Civil War; the Trans-Mississippi frontier. The book draws generously on Ellithorpe’s journals and his many published letters in a Chicago newspaper (yes; Ellithorpe was a writer; too!). Johansson credits herself as the “editor;†but she truly deserves author credit because of her contextualization of the chapters in Ellithorpe’s life; as well as her tremendous archival work.
