Frontiers in the Gilded Age

In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop beyond the United States where Americans chased capitalist dreams. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how frontier spaces could glitter with potential and grandiose dreams, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that Indigenous people summoned when threatened. Through a series of stories, Offenburger explores how a shared frontier ideology shaped a global system.