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Lawrence B. A. Hatter, Patrick Spero. Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 211–212, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.211
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Like a scholarly Gordon Ramsay, Patrick Spero wholeheartedly embraces his own f-word in his new book Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania. Though it is unlikely to earn reproach when uttered in earshot of a Wodehousian aunt, talking about the frontier provoked disgust among revisionist historians, who rightly point out the ethnocentric and triumphalist narrative underpinning the concept first proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. Down, but not out, frontiers witnessed something of a revival in the 1990s as early American scholars wrestled with ways to resurrect the interpretive power of the concept while stripping the frontier of its Turnerian baggage. Despite these efforts, historians are still far more likely to speak of borderlands—contested spaces between empires—than they are of frontiers.
Spero thinks that this is a mistake: borderlands are an anachronism created by historians, while colonists frequently used the term “frontier.” Frontier Country seeks to recover what colonists and colonial officials meant when they used the term “frontier” to describe their world. Spero argues that in colonial America there were “frontiers” (plural, rather than singular). “A frontier in early America was a zone that people considered vulnerable to invasion, one that was created when colonists feared an onslaught from imperial rivals and other enemies” (6). As such, frontiers waxed and waned according to geopolitical conditions that were often disputed between frontier people in the west and colonial officials in the east. Spero extensively mined the Early American Newspapers database to carefully chart the usage of frontier terms over time, revealing that the concept of a single frontier as a line of advancing American colonization, which is central to Turner’s thesis, did not emerge until later in the nineteenth century.
