The Frontier Exchange Economy of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the Eighteenth Century

Bibliographic Data

ID3280071
AuthorsDaniel H Usner (corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume44
Issue2
Pages165
Publication date1987-04-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1939662
OpenAlexW2316224808
LanguageEN
Citations received17

I T is an old fact and far from a new observation that the lower Mississippi Valley has been generally relegated to the margins of early American historiography. The region has been borderland territory for historians as it once was for the English colonies of the Atlantic coast, and its people have been largely ignored or casually dismissed as mere bit-players in the drama of American development-colorful, no doubt, but peripheral and unimportant. The historical point of view has been determinatively eastern: our impression of the great West, during the years before it fell under the expanding sovereignty of the United States, is still dominated by images of white explorers, trappers, and traders, and of Indian warriors fighting European imperial wars. The lands along the Mississippi River have remained an amorphous area realizing westward (in Robert Frost's phrase) and waiting to be occupied by Anglo-Americans and their Afro-American slaves. This West, in a word, has been only dimly realized by historians as a place with a history of its own and a people whose tale is worth telling in its own right. This is not to imply that the vast region known in colonial times as Louisiana has been wholly neglected. Such nineteenth-century historians as Francis Parkman and Justin Winsor depicted it as an arena of international contests for empire. But this grand stage upon which great men acted long overshadowed the people who actually shaped society and economy within the region.' Historians based in the Mississippi Valley

Ancient history · Archaeology · Cartography · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Fell · Frontier · Geography · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · History · Law

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