To Americans the word "frontier" usually evokes images of cowboys and Indians, longhorns and buffalo, and shoot-outs on Main Street--in short, the American West. Yet other countries, too, have had their frontiers, and the entire New World served as a frontier for Europeans after the fifteenth century.
The study of frontiers that began with the works of Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb has in recent years developed a comparative dimension. The five essays of this volume look at European expansion into Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Southern Africa, and Australia. The authors...