Frontiers in the Gilded Age
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Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917
Andrew Offenburger
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Format: HardcoverPrice: $45.00
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The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both
“A valuable first step toward creating a global history of the concepts of the frontier, borderlands, and colonialism.”—Carol Higham, Reviews in American History
This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.
“A valuable first step toward creating a global history of the concepts of the frontier, borderlands, and colonialism.”—Carol Higham, Reviews in American History
This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
Andrew Offenburger is assistant professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In 2014–2015 he was the David J. Weber Postdoctoral Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies.
"A unique and informative contribution to U.S.-Mexico borderlands history."—Todd Wahlstrom, Journal of American History
“A valuable first step toward creating a global history of the concepts of the frontier, borderlands, and colonialism. . . . Sets a new standard for research.”—Carol Higham, Reviews in American History
“Frontiers in the Gilded Age is an important book because it reveals surprising connections among unexpected borderlanders, causing us to rethink transnational encounters in neighboring countries in order to ask questions about the entire globe.”—Alicia M. Dewey, Southwestern Historical Quarterly
“In this dramatic narrative peopled with an extraordinary cast of larger than life characters, Andrew Offenburger manages to weave together African, U.S., Mexican, and Indigenous history into a devastating portrait of the dark underside of global capitalist expansion during the Gilded Age."—Karl Jacoby, author of The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
“Andrew Offenburger provides a smart, engaging, and revealing examination of the connectedness of the western U.S., northern Mexico, and Southern Africa through the ideas and actions of capitalists, adventurers, missionaries, and indigenous peoples from 1880-1920. In doing so, he prompts us to think broadly and creatively about the parameters of both the Global West and the Gilded Age, as well as the social Darwinistic frontier ideology that connected the British and American Empires.”— David Wrobel, author of America’s West: A History, 1890-1950
“This deeply researched and well-argued book makes an important contribution to scholarship about frontiers and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of borderlands and frontiers, capitalism, race and racism, and transnational history.”—Evan C. Rothera, The Journal of Arizona History
ISBN: 9780300225877
Publication Date: June 25, 2019
Publishing Partner: Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
Publication Date: June 25, 2019
Publishing Partner: Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
320 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
23 b/w illus.
23 b/w illus.
