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To Americans the word frontier usually evokes images of cowboys and Indians, longhorns and buffalo, and shoot-outs on Main Street--in short, the American West. Yet other countries, too, have had their frontiers, and the entire New World served as a frontier for Europeans after the fifteenth century. The study of frontiers that began with the works of Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb has in recent years developed a comparative dimension. The five essays of this volume look at European expansion into Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Southern Africa, and Australia. The authors assess for their particular regions the effects of European trade and settlement on both the environment and the native peoples, the role of racial attitudes, the development of the economy and the characteristics of the labor force, the growth of frontier institutions, and the relation of the frontier region to the European "metropolis." While the essays are not explicitly comparative, they suggest a rich variety of comparative insights into the development of the frontier in world history. The authors of the essays and their contributions are Philip Wayne Powell, "North America's First Frontier, 1546-1603"; W.J. Eccles, "The Frontiers of New France"; Warren Dean, "Ecological and Economic Relationships in Frontier History: Sao Paulo, Brazil"; Leonard Thompson, "The Southern African Frontier in Comparative Perspective"; and Robin W. Winks, " Australia, the Frontier, and the Tyranny of Distance."

Widely recognized as a classic of American historiography, "The Frontier in American History" examines the importance of the unsettled West as both idea and physical reality. Turner's essays explore the changing frontier as it moved progressively westward and discuss the contributions of the pioneers in each frontier area to the development of modern American democracy.

In this little classic, first published in 1977, Ray A. Billington outlines the threecenturylong process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility. "The American Frontiersman" looks at the mountain men of the fur trade who succumbed to the wilderness world in which they found themselves and in which they were forced to begin the climb upward to civilization once more. In "The Frontier and American Culture" the author suggests that although many backwoodsmen seceded from civilization, others made a heroic effort to perpetuate their culture. And in "Cowboys, Indians, and the Land of Promise" Billington reviews the worldwide myths of the American West--its violence and lawlessness on the one hand and its ripe abundance on the other.