Jay Gitlin is lecturer, Department of History, Yale University, and associate director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders.
"This is one of those rare books that makes immensely important and
original arguments of its own while also synthesizing a massive and
far-reaching scholarly literature. I cannot overemphasize the
importance of such a study."—Peter Kastor, Washington University in
St. Louis
*Peter Kastor*
"Jay Gitlin's book will expand our knowledge about the American
West in various ways. Negotiation, rather than conquest, will be
seen as the appropriate framework for understanding the fate of
French Creoles in Mid-America. We will also realize the need to
explore more closely how families and family businesses shaped
western expansion."—Daniel Usner, Vanderbilt
*Daniel Usner*
"Jay Gitlin’s comprehensive portrait of mid-America’s Francophone
merchants demonstrates their importance as fur traders, town
builders and advance agents of American empire. It adds a
valuable new dimension to the story of national expansion and
belongs on every western American history bookshelf."—William E.
Foley, coauthor of The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early
St. Louis
*William Foley*
"In this truly original and broad ranging The Bourgeois Frontier,
Jay Gitlin reverses Francis Parkman's more than century-old
assertion that with the defeat of the French in the French and
Indian War, the French presence as a power in the Mississippi
Valley virtually disappeared because the settlers were simply
peasant villagers who were later overwhelmed by George Roger
Clark's conquest of the French in Illinois during the American
Revolution and when the United States made the Louisiana Purchase
in 1803. Instead, Gitlin finds that a core of highly
successful French fur traders and merchants were already
established in St. Louis headed by the powerful Chouteau family and
other merchants all along the Mississippi River. Far from
succumbing to their American conquerors, they joined them as
allies, assisting them in the fur trade, supplying American
explorers, frontier forts, and Indian tribes, and in developing new
towns. Gitlin not only follows the careers of the remarkable
Chouteaus, but of scores of other French merchants who created a
'Creole Crescent' from St. Paul and Detroit to New Orleans, all the
while preserving their own French culture to the 1840s. But
when the French in St. Louis and New Orleans, many of whom owned
slaves, sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War, their
francophone world came to an end. The great contribution of
The Bourgeois Frontier has been to uncover the key role the French
played as town builders, merchants, and frontier expansionists in
developing the American West. It is time, writes Gitlin, to
recognize this other side of our national ancestry and have Uncle
Sam make room for Oncle Auguste."—Howard R. Lamar, Yale University,
author of The New Encyclopedia of the American West
*Howard Lamar*
Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction category of the 2009 New
England Book Festival sponsored by the Larimar St. Croix Writers
Colony, The Hollywood Creative Directory; eDivvy, Shopanista and
Westside Websites
*New England Book Festival*
Winner of the 2010 Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize for the best book in
French colonial history, given by the French Colonial Historical
Society
*French Colonial Historical Society*
“This book serves as a welcome addition to the literature of the
West.”—Missouri Historical Review
*Missouri Historical Review*
"This is a well-researched and well-written book about a colonial
culture whose last visible remnant was its elite."—Edward Watts,
Indiana Magazine of History
*Indiana Magazine of History*
"[Gitlin's] engaging book is largely a success."—Andrew Cayton,
Western Historical Quarterly
*Western Historical Quarterly*
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