Winner of the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for History
History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893 is a monumental account of the American West and the long, turbulent movement of westward expansion. Frederic Logan Paxson follows the American pioneer across nearly 150 years of settlement, conflict, ambition, and transformation, tracing the frontier from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast. Across fifty-nine richly detailed chapters, Paxson reveals how a vast continent was explored, claimed, contested, financed, governed, and ultimately woven into the national story of the United States.
This sweeping work captures the frontier not as a simple tale of migration, but as one of the defining forces in American history. Paxson examines the War for Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, conflicts with Native American nations, the Civil War, presidential policy, canal building, railroad expansion, frontier finance, and the rise of corporations that carried settlement deeper into the continent. With a historian's command of geography, politics, economics, and human movement, he brings clarity to the immense forces that shaped the American frontier and remade the nation.
Authoritative, expansive, and deeply insightful, Paxson's Pulitzer Prize-winning history remains essential reading for students, scholars, and serious readers of American history. Few works so fully capture the drama, scale, and consequence of westward expansion-or explain so powerfully how the frontier helped define the character, conflicts, and destiny of the United States.
About the Author: Frederic L. Paxson was a distinguished American historian, President of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and a leading authority on the American frontier. He earned his undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master's degree from Harvard University. Paxson is best remembered for his scholarship on American expansion and westward settlement.
