Detailed item info | Size | | Length: | 285 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in. | | Width: | 6.3 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 15.2 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | "A first-rate piece of work and a fine read."—Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis"This excellent history of early Kentucky resonates with the most important questions in the history of the early republic, frontier, and economic development. One of the book's great strengths is its 'genre-busting' quality, taking up ethnohistory and settlement history in the same narrative."—John Mack Faragher, Yale UniversityEighteenth-century Kentucky was a place where Indian and European cultures collided—and, surprisingly, coincided. But this mixed world did not last, and it eventually gave way to nineteenth-century commercial and industrial development. How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were not perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was not achieved, and the millennium that did not arrive. Seeking to explain why these dreams were not realized, Stephen Aron shows us what did happen during Kentucky's tumultuous passage from Daniel Boone's world to Henry Clay's. "The book shatters customary generic boundaries to incorporate insights from many types of history—social, political, economic, ethnohistory, women's history, religious history, even the 'new' western history . . . no one prior to Aron has so thoroughly and insightfully examined the range of complex issues involved in the development of Kentucky from frontier to settlement."—Charles B. Churchill, History: Reviews of New Books"How the West Was Lost engages the reader; it actually asks us to think about the issues it raises rather than accept the author's conclusions as a definitive last word on them. Aron has written a book that demands that attention be paid to trans-Appalachia's important role in the conquest of North America while it underscores the contested nature of its history. And for that, we are all in his debt."—Andrew R. L. Cayton, Georgia Historical Quarterly
| | Industry reviews | This is an elegantly written book that provides an excellent analysis of the evolution of economic and political institutions in the trans-Appalachian west. Aron's discussion of the emergence of the Bluegrass gentry and their consolidation of power is particularly valuable, as is his comparison of Shawnee and backwoodsmen societies. Less convincing is his argument that long hunters such as Daniel Boone, like the frontier entrepreneurs who followed in Boone's wake, were motivated primarily by land speculation. . . . Such quibbling aside, however, this is an important book.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Edmunds
Scholars toiling in the field of early frontier history know that few new sources emerge each year (and few new ones are here). In fact, given all the study done for generation after generation, it seemed for a time that the field had become barren ground, overharvested historically. But this work demonstrates again that new examinations by the scholars of another era--Aron, John Mack Faragher, Elizabeth Perkins, Ellen Eslinger, Fredrika Teute, and others--can bring fresh results to even the most studied field. There is much that can be debated or even challenged here, but the key is that a new discussion of that First West is underway, with good promise for the historiographical future. This is an excellent study--well written, well researched, and well argued.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Klotter
In the tradition of the new social historians, Aron looks for commonality among the Native American cultural groups and the first white hunters and settlers in the Ohio valley. He is interested in the process by which Indian and white hunters interacted and drew apart. Aron also traces the complex process of acquiring land, and the often more difficult task of legally keeping it, as well as the commercial development of the Bluegrass region and Green River Country. The result is less a broad study of the Kentucky frontier than a tightly focused social history of the settlement process within the context of land acquisition and commercial development. Herein lies the strengths and weakness of this study: while much of Aron's interpretation is fresh and provocative, much of what he has to say has already been told.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Hurt
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