American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

Acknowledgments

Since this book is about the compromises and collaborations that once characterized the frontiers at the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers, it is appropriate that I acknowledge the accommodations and adjustments made for me by many individuals and institutions. Thanks to Walter Nugent and Malcolm Rohrbough for engaging me to write a book about frontier Missouri and accepting a book whose geography challenged the definitions of their series. Along with Walter and Mac, Robert Sloan proved patient and flexible in waiting for the belated delivery of the manuscript and in allowing me the title of my choosing. My thanks as well go to Elaine Durham Otto for her superb copyediting. For the last eight years, a period that coincides with the research and writing of this book, the University of California, Los Angeles has provided me with a wonderful academic home. I am grateful to the History Department, whose faculty provided stimulating intellectual companionship and spirited athletic competition. Three chairs—Ron Mellor, Brenda Stevenson, and Teo Ruiz—deserve special recognition for making the department so invigorating and for being so obliging when I asked permission to split my appointment between UCLA and the Autry National Center. To this list should be added Scott Waugh, who as dean of social sciences made possible my dual appointment and generously supported my research. Over the past two and a half years, I have complained that my dual appointments seem like dueling ones, especially on days when the freeways of Los Angeles don’t cooperate. Certainly, the complications of holding two positions delayed the completion of this book. Still, on most days I feel that with one foot at Acknowledgments UCLA and one at the Autry, I enjoy the best of both university and museum worlds. For this opportunity, I owe much to John Sussman and John Gray, who brought me to the Autry, taught me how museums work, and adjusted to the peculiarities of my schedule. Above all, being at the Autry has renewed my faith in the importance of history, and I hope that comes through in the pages that follow. The ideas that animate the following pages trace to more publications and conversations than I can remember or possibly cite in the book’s endnotes. John Mack Faragher and Richard White, I hope, will appreciate how their scholarship has inspired and informed this book. The same is true for Joyce Appleby, Hal Barron, Alfred Bush, Ellen Dubois, Janet Fireman, John Gray, Eric Hinderaker, Thomas Hines, Peter Mancall, Karen Merrill, Melissa Meyer, John Murrin, Gary Nash, Walter Nugent, David Myers, Robert Ritchie, Malcolm Rohrbough, Virginia Scharff, Sharon Ullman, Joan Waugh, Mark Wetherington, and Henry Yu. Although I have had only one or two brief meetings with Carl Ekberg, William Foley, and Walter Schroeder, much of what I know about the Missouri frontier builds from their work. Invitations to lecture or conduct seminars at California State University, Northridge, the Claremont Graduate School, the Colorado Historical Society, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, the Filson Historical Society, the Missouri Conference on History , the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Utah, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Washington University , Western Illinois University, and Western Kentucky University gave me opportunities to present portions of the book to a variety of audiences and gained me extremely valuable feedback . So, too, were the responses from hundreds of students at UCLA, who listened (usually patiently) to the sometimes halfbaked ideas that I tested out in various courses. Among those students, I am most in debt to the members of WHEAT and to the splendid research assistance provided by Greg Beyrer, Mike Bottoms, Cynthia Culver, Lawrence Culver, Nat Sheidley, Allison Varzally, and Lissa Wadewitz. As I explain in the introduction, my work on a world history textbook profoundly altered the ambitions of this book, and I Acknowledgments  x am grateful to my coauthors—Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, Michael Tsin, and Robert Tignor—for broadening my historical vision. More than any individual, my collaborations with Jeremy Adelman have enriched my understandings of frontiers and borderlands and have shaped this book. There would be no shape (and no book) at all without access to and assistance from the Autry Library, the Braun Research Library, the Filson Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Mudd Library at Princeton University, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, the State Historical Society of Missouri in...