When it appeared in 1949, the first edition of Ray Allen Billington's 'Westward Expansion' set a new standard for scholarship in western American history, and the book's reputation among historians, scholars, and students grew through four subsequent editions. This abridgment and revision of Billington and Martin Ridge's fifth edition, with a new introduction and additional scholarship by Ridge, as well as an updated bibliography, focuses on the Trans-Mississippi frontier. Although the text sets out the remarkable story of the American frontier, which became, almost from the beginning, an...

The limerick, one of the oldest and most challenging of verse forms, has traditionally been the plaything of Oxford dons, American academicians, and a sprinkling of men of wit. Historian Ray Allen Billington worked on his own collection for fifty years. Here is the cream of that collection--original and classical limericks, irreverent, spicy, funny, and, of course, suggestive.

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The hypothesis advanced in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, has been debated by three generations of scholars. The pioneering experience, Turner suggested, accounted for some of the distinctive characteristics of the American people: during three centuries of expansion their attitudes toward democracy, nationalism and individualism were altered, and they developed distinctively American traits, such as wastefulness, inventiveness, mobility, and a dozen more. After opening with a summary of the appearance, acceptance, and...