In Frontier Fictions, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet looks at the efforts of Iranians to defend, if not expand, their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explores how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. The "frontier fictions," or the ways in which the Iranians viewed their often fluctuating borders and the conflicts surrounding them, played a dominant role in defining the nation. On these borderlands, new ideas of citizenship and nationality were unleashed, refining older ideas of ethnicity. Kashani-Sabet maintains that land-based conceptions of countries existed before the advent of the modern nation-state. Her focus on geography enables her to explore and document fully a wide range of aspects of modern citizenship in Iran, including love of homeland, the hegemony of the Persian language, and widespread interest in archaeology, travel, and map-making. While many historians have focused on the concept of the "imagined community" in their explanations of the rise of nationalism, Kashani-Sabet is able to complement this perspective with a very tangible explanation of what connects people to a specific place. Her approach is intended to enrich our understanding not only of Iranian nationalism, but also of nationalism everywhere.

This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.

This anthology of speculative fiction stories on the themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism focuses on the viewpoints of the colonized. Sixteen authors share their experiences of being the silent voices in history and on the wrong side of the final frontier; their fantasies of a reality in which straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males don't tell us how they won every war; and their revenge against the alien oppressor settling their "new world."

As explorers conquered the frontiers of North America, they disturbed sleeping terrors and things long forgotten by humanity. Journey into the undiscovered country where fierce Vikings struggle against monstrous abominations. Travel with European colonists as they learn of buried secrets and the creatures guarding ancient knowledge. Go west across the plains, into the territories were sorcerers dwell in demon-haunted lands, and cowboys confront cosmic horrors.

John Anthony Caruso's The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward expansion. Bringing to life the region's history from its earliest seventeenth-century scouting parties to the admission of Tennessee to the Union in 1796, Caruso describes the exchange of ideas, values, and cultural traits that marked Appalachia as a unique frontier. Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the Regulators in North Carolina; the founding of the Watauga, Transylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland settlements; the siege of Boonesboro; and the patterns and challenges of frontier life. While narrating the gripping stories of such figures as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and Chief Logan, Caruso combines social, political, and economic history into a comprehensive overview of the early mountain South. In his new introduction, John C. Inscoe examines how this work exemplified the so-called consensus school of history that arose in the United States during the cold war. Unabashedly celebratory in his analysis of American nation building, Caruso shows how the development of Appalachia fit into the grander scheme of the evolution of the country. While there is much in The Appalachian Frontier that contemporary historians would regard as one-sided and romanticized, Inscoe points out that "those of us immersed so deeply in the study of the region and its people sometimes tend to forget that the white settlement of the mountain south in the eighteenth century was not merely the chronological foundation of the Appalachian experience. As Caruso so vividly demonstrates, it is also represented a vital--even defining--stage in the American progression across the continent." The Author: John Anthony Caruso was a professor of history at West Virginia University. He died in 1997. John C. Inscoe is professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is editor of Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation and author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.

What is the future of the American West? This book look at works of utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic science fiction to show how narratives of the past and future powerfully shape our understanding of the present-day West.

Marshall Hunter only wanted to fly: the faster, the higher, the better. But a life of rescuing wayward spacefarers and derelict satellites in the cislunar cruiser U.S.S. Borman is far from the adventure he’d imagined. But his fortunes change when a billionaire couple goes missing on their way to a near-Earth asteroid. Out of contact and on a course that will eventually send them crashing into Mars, the nuclear-powered Borman is dispatched on an audacious, high-speed interplanetary run to bring the couple home. As they approach the asteroid, however, the Borman itself becomes hopelessly disabled. With the Borman suddenly out of commission and far beyond reach, cislunar space begins falling into chaos as critical satellites fail and valuable lunar mineral shipments begin disappearing in transit. Nothing is as it seems, and Marshall Hunter and the rest of the crew suspect none of it is by coincidence. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). About Frozen Orbit: “. . . hard science fiction and an entertaining and gripping plot. . . . Chiles nails the atmosphere of a NASA-run human spaceflight mission in the 21st century, the jargon of the mission controllers and astronauts, and the bureaucratic infighting characterizing today’s NASA. . . . The scenario and background . . . are the scaffolding on which a gripping tale is formed. Readers experience the wonder the astronauts feel on a remarkable voyage, groan as the Earth goes crazy as the expedition progresses, and thrill to a powerful conclusion . . . science fiction at its best.”—The Galveston County Daily News About Farside by Patrick Chiles: “The situations are realistic, the characters interesting, the perils harrowing, and the stakes could not be higher."— John Walker, Ricochet.com “. . . a fast-paced and exciting story that bounces between the borders of technological thriller and science fiction. . . . an impressive effort."—The Galveston County Daily News