Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania

Early American Studies

By: Patrick Spero

Narrated by: Douglas R. Pratt

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies. These violent encounters created what Spero describes as a distinctive "frontier society" on the eve of the American Revolution that transformed the once-peaceful colony of Pennsylvania into a "frontier country."

Spero narrates Pennsylvania's story through a sequence of formative but until now largely overlooked confrontations: an eight-year-long border war between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1730s; the Seven Years' War and conflicts with Native Americans in the 1750s; a series of frontier rebellions in the 1760s that rocked the colony and its governing elite; and wars Pennsylvania fought with Virginia and Connecticut in the 1770s over its western and northern borders. Synthesizing the tensions between high and low politics and between eastern and western regions in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, Spero recasts the importance of frontiers to the development of colonial America and the origins of American Independence.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"One of the best books of 2017." (Philadelphia Inquirer)

"This fascinating book will...deservedly remain a standard work on the topic." (Journal of the American Revolution)

"Thought-provoking...breathes new life into the age-old problems of frontiers..." (Historical Quarterly)

©2016 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2023 Redwood Audiobooks

An excellent synapsis of early Pennsylvania

Very well researched and delivered in an understandable manner. Truly enlightening of early life on the first frontier of the American experience.