Those of us who study the English colonies on the Atlantic are apt to overlook the importance of the frontier city in the early modern world. We tend to emphasize towns in New England, plantations in the American South and the West Indies, and view the urban life of New Amsterdam as a Dutch anomaly. But in the larger context of European overseas expansion, the city was critical, providing the foundation of empire.

The European frontier cities in Asia preceded and coincided with the building of frontier towns and cities in the Americas. These cities were the entrepôts for world...

On August 29, 2005, Matthew Broderick, the commander of the Homeland Security Operations Center in Washington, D.C., did not believe the early reports he was hearing that floodwalls had been breached in New Orleans. After all, the Army Corps of Engineers itself seemed to confirm that overtopping was the only source of rising water in Crescent City neighborhoods. Still undecided, the former U.S. Marine general saw a late Monday afternoon news report on CNN: The network broadcasted a scene from Bourbon Street, where some people were apparently partying. “The one data point that I really had, personally, visually, was the...

For the Sulpician priest René-Charles de Breslay, it was more than a metaphor that the Indians had their French neighbors by the throat. Breslay lived near the southwestern tip of the island of Montreal, a few hours’ walk from a growing colonial town of the same name. He settled away from the French population center to minister to a small Nipissing Indian village that had risen at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. Breslay called the village his mission, but the Nipissings called it home, suffering his presence there only after sustained pressure from their French commercial...

Frontiers come into existence when individuals get ahead of the political and economic policies that are meant to control them, but frontiers are also the farthest point to which an imperial power can throw its voice and expect to hear an echo of that voice come back. They can be transitional zones or lines in the sand. In what French authorities in the eighteenth century called the pays d’en haut, or upper country of the vast territory watered by the Great Lakes, Detroit was both place of transition and place of settlement. Prior to this time, Algonquian and Iroquois nations...

In 1775, a piece of startling news reached the Ohio Valley towns of the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Wyandot nations. The thirteen tribes of Americans had held a great council in Philadelphia and formed a confederacy to drive their Father, King George, from North America. The unbelievable part of this story was not that the Americans had rebelled against King George. It was that they were trying to cooperate.

The Indians were careful observers of the Anglo-Americans who had been pushing west of the Appalachian Mountains since the 1740s. The Natives had names for the two tribes they knew best....

It was a classic nineteenth-century frontier city. Located on a major river, it exploded from a handful of native huts to a vital center of trade by channeling to the world an abundant local resource that filled hungry needs thousands of miles away. Men on the make organized new methods of tapping the hinterland, first dominating and then exploiting the indigenous population. Local wages were high, but so were prices: staples like coffee and beans cost four times what they did in New York City. Outsiders considered this city wild and woolly, but as money poured in it took on...

On an early March morning in 1893, a small flotilla of Indian dugout canoes landed on Seattle’s waterfront, filled to the gunwales with clothing trunks, furniture, tools, and passengers. Indians were hardly a novel sight around Puget Sound. The city’s namesake, Seeathl, was a former Indian leader revered by natives and whites alike. Natives plied clams and fish on downtown streets, harvested crops and felled trees in the surrounding countryside, or worked as domestics for affluent white Seattleites in the streetcar suburbs. But the sudden arrival of these “red denizens” attracted a “large and curious crowd.” These Indians were refugees....

In his book The Urban Frontier Richard Wade described frontier cities as the “spearheads of the frontier.” Like all classic descriptions, it is succinct, evocative, and elusive. The literal sharpness of the metaphor—the “spearhead,” piercing ahead of the wave of settlement—suggests that frontier cities have a precise location and function, serving as intermediary between the core system behind it and the frontier out in front of it.¹

Yet, on the other hand, the fact that a spear is thrown suggests volatility—of speed, of location—that has long complicated historians’ efforts to define and understand the phenomenon. After...

Estwick Evans worried about New Orleans. A New Hampshire native who engaged in a lengthy passage through the northern and western borderlands in 1818, Evans expressed those fears in a detailed narrative of his travels. When it came to New Orleans, the quintessential frontier city, Evans asked “will not our citizens ... more readily imbibe, and more freely communicate the corrupt practices of this place? But, if by the praiseworthy conduct of our citizens residing in New-Orleans, immorality shall be checked, and good principles introduced, then, indeed, it will prove a purchase, not only for our country, but for mankind.”¹...

When I think about the best cultural indicators of any frontier city, my mind goes immediately to the work of John Francis McDermott, an interdisciplinary scholar of the history of the book before such terms were coined. In a scholarly career stretching from the 1930s to the 1980s, McDermott investigated the cultural and intellectual history of his beloved St. Louis. From his very first book, Private Libraries in Creole St. Louis, McDermott tracked the distribution of books and their appearance in early communities of the Midwest in a way destined to debunk long-held notions of what the frontier meant to...