In his gripping new book...historian Patrick Spero reveals how differing hopes for North America’s future led to different views of peace and war ... Mr. Spero, the director of the American Philosophical Society Library, has produced an excellent and important explication of frontier tensions and their world-shaking consequences. His new book does what the best histories do: It places readers at the scene—whether with grumbling frontiersmen in Cunningham’s Tavern who rise in anger as a party of traders walks in, or amid a large gathering of Native leaders at Fort Chartres singing a war song to threaten a British envoy—and makes us wonder what will happen next.
Frontier Rebels makes for a good read, a lost bit of American history in a greater colonial epic in need of telling. It would work better sticking to its story as an example of a lost history of the Revolutionary War frontier. The book has well prepared maps and a useful glossary of 'Cast of Characters and Important Places.'
Spero argues effectively ... For professional and casual historians of early American government, military, and citizen protest movements, this well-researched and concisely written monograph takes a timely look back at the history and spirit of dissent.
...intensively researched ... Readers who have been accustomed to considering the Revolutionary War as a conflict between American liberty and British oppression may find this account discomfiting, but Spero presents convincing support for his thesis that hatred of Indians and desire for their lands played a pivotal role in fomenting the revolution and 'produced the roadmap' for the next century of American history, delving deeply into previously underutilized sources, including the journals of fur trader George Croghan. Spero’s thoughtful work is an important contribution to ongoing reassessments of the nature and meaning of the American founding.
A persuasive effort to locate the origins of the American Revolution not in Boston Harbor but in the dense woodlands of western Pennsylvania ... the author also locates an early stirring of the Second Amendment in [the rebels'] leader James Smith, who drafted the revolutionary constitution of Pennsylvania that asserted that 'the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state.' A welcome contribution to frontier history.
