The Age of the Borderlands

Approx. 296 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 6 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8505-2
Published: April 2025

David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

Hardcover Available April 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

Buy this Book

Hardcover $35.00

For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence.

Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government's power: The land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.

Published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas

About the Author

Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas.
For more information about Andrew C. Isenberg, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Isenberg offers a fresh look at American expansion. This perceptive and innovative book will shift the writing on the early nation and the West."—Elliott West, University of Arkansas

"With talent and insight, Isenberg tells surprising new stories of cultural encounters and western settlement. As a result of this important and compelling book, readers will see the West in new ways."—Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873