'At some point in the recent past, borderlands history entered the mainstream. All across North America—from the seventeenth-century Great Lakes and eighteenth-century Great Basin to the nineteenth-century Rio Bravo and the twentieth-century Columbia River—historians have gravitated to tales of economic exchange, cultural mixing, and political contestation at the edges of empires, nations, and world systems. Anchored in spatial mobility, situational identity, local contingency, and the ambiguities of power, this is the brave new world of borderlands history.'
