Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlements and Colonial Encounters

摘要

Frontier Life is not just an online book about frontiers in general. It is both broader and narrower than that. It is broader because it is not simply a text which one might settle down to read but a multimedia resource for teaching and research. Video interviews and graphical forms such as pictures and interactive maps form part of it. It is also narrower than the title suggests: in the introduction we are invited to "Experience Life on the Edges of the Anglophone World". This means that, whilst hardly parochial, its concern is solely with English-speaking culture: the British empire and the USA. So, we know from the start that much is to be excluded: the frontiers of the French colonial world or Russia-in-Asia or Spain with its vast American dominions are nowhere to be seen in Frontier Life. That is not to mention the frontiers of Ottoman Turkey, India or China. The time-frame of the site is also relatively recent, covering the past 250 years. But, let us not sell the site short: this still leaves a tremendous amount of history to be covered.