North American Borderlands

The area between two countries, or at the edges of a civilization, has been called many things—frontier, backcountry, and most recently, the borderland. Even though borderlands are frequently located at the peripheries of empires and nations, they nevertheless shape how centers of national power—cities, national capitols, and so forth—have defined their relation to issues such as territorial expansion, sovereignty, immigration, labor, community formation, difference, and race and ethnicity. And in this global landscape, the borderlands area can teach a lot about how societies interact and how nations came to be as they are.

North American Borderlands introduces students to exemplary recent scholarship on borderlands, focusing on borderland relationships—transnational or trans-cultural explorations of the many peoples and perspectives within borderlands regions. Anchored by a substantial introduction that walks students through the terminology and theory, the collection brings together prominent scholarship on a variety of prominent themes, ranging from the Rio Grande to the St. Lawrence River, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Spanning the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, the collection presents the major debates and questions most prominent in the field today.

Brian DeLay is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War.