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Charles R. Cutter, Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain's North American Frontiers, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 494–495, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486248
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Under the auspices of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, a group of scholars met on a couple of occasions in the opening years of this century to present, debate, and exchange ideas on how “social control” functioned in frontier areas of New Spain. Out of those intellectual conversations came the present volume, which, as the title indicates, examines the varied methods used by colonial authorities as they attempted to guide the behavior of those who lived on the fringes of the empire. The eleven essays focus generally on the eighteenth century and have a broad geographic coverage that stretches from Florida to California and includes many northern Mexican states. They reveal both the distinctive and the shared forms of social control at work in discrete geographic and cultural zones. The diversity of locales is matched by the diversity of scholarly approaches and modes of analysis that seek to explain the dynamics of social control on the Spanish frontier.
