Border Life

In this original and sensitive ethnography of frontier life, Elizabeth Perkins recovers the rhythms of warfare, subsistence, and cultural encounter that governed existence on the margins of British America. Richly detailed, Border Life captures the intimate perceptive universe of the men and women who colonized Kentucky and southern Ohio during the Revolutionary era. In reconstructing the mental world of border inhabitants, Perkins draws on a pioneering source in oral history. In the 1840s, the