American Confluence

The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

Stephan Aron

Narrated by Randy Whitlow

Available from Audible

Book published by Indiana University Press

In the heart of North America, the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers come together, uniting waters from west, north, and east on a journey to the south. This is the region that Stephen Aron calls the American Confluence. Aron’s innovative book examines the history of that region—a home to the Osage, a colony exploited by the French, a new frontier explored by Lewis and Clark—and focuses on the region’s transition from a place of overlapping borderlands to one of oppositional border states. American Confluence is a lively account that will delight both the amateur and professional historian.

Stephan Aron is Professor of History at UCLA and Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center. He is author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay.

REVIEWS:

“This sophisticated analysis ... focuses upon the sprawling lands that marked the intersection of the country's three primary rivers—the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri—as well as the diverse peoples who inhabited those lands between 1600 and 1860.... Recommended.”

—Choice

“This is western history at its best.”

—Western Historical Quarterly

“A real pleasure to read, the book adds considerably to the anthropological discussion about the degree to which invading people are successful in transplanting their culture and the degree to which they are transformed by the new environment and peoples they are invading.”

—Missouri Historical Review

“A fascinating and useful contribution to both Atlantic world and North American West scholarship—a claim certainly few other monographs could make.”

—H-Atlantic