"Frontiers in the Gilded Age" by Andrew Offenburger

Frontiers in the Gilded Age Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917 Andrew Offenburger

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Series:: The Lamar Series in Western History
Format:: Hardback
Publication date:: 13 Aug 2019
ISBN:: 9780300225877
Imprint:: Yale University Press
Dimensions:: 320 pages: 235 x 156 x 27mm
Illustrations:: 23 b-w illus.

Categories:

Humanities »
History »
Ancient to Modern »
Modern History to 20th Century c 1700 to c 1900 »

The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both

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.

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.